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About John Obafemi Jones
John Obafemi Jones’s art is a story of roots, rhythm, discovery—and more than forty years of seeing, feeling, and transforming life into color, figure, and gesture. Here’s a bio that reflects that journey, with his Brooklyn formative years in view. John was born in Ellaville, Georgia, in 1950, into a world shaped by the South’s Black Belt tradition. At an early age, his family migrated north, settling in Brooklyn, New York. There—on the sidewalks, in crowded schoolrooms, among museum halls—he got his earliest taste of what art could do: to record memory, to challenge, and to heal. Junior high school teachers noticed his talent and encouraged him to attend drawing classes at The Metropolitan Museum. He later studied at Pratt Institute, and then at Fisk University, where he deepened his engagement with African American histories of art.
Brooklyn was not just home—it was a crucible. It gave him exposure to formal art training, to the energy of jazz and blues, to layered identities. These influences became part of his artistic DNA. Over time, he learned to let multiple techniques speak in his work: drawing and mark-making alongside painting; free-flowing, gestural line against flattened fields of color; forms that dance between abstraction and the human figure.
In 1979, Jones made a pivotal move to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. There, his work opened into new expanses—light, shapes, Caribbean rhythm, ritual. Over four decades, he has built a body of paintings and mixed media works that explore themes of identity, cultural memory, ritual, unity, and motion. In “Revelations” (2022), for example, his figures—often female—move in swirling fields, dancing to unheard rhythms, reminding the viewer that spirit lives in motion.
Technically, Jones’s art is generous in method. He uses painting, drawing, mark-making; pastels, oil sticks, and mixed media; layering patterns and textures; balancing the gestural with the composed. His figures may be faceless, but they are never voiceless—they command space through posture, movement, color. The music of jazz and blues isn’t just a subject; it’s a structure: improvisation, repetition, call-and-response, and momentum.
What emerges is a work anchored by four decades of practice, rooted in Southern origins and Brooklyn schooling, flowering in a Caribbean home. Jones continues to invite us into paintings that are not only seen but felt—visual music, lived history, alive.
See inside the studio
"My paintings don't just speak—they echo across generations. They belong where legacy lives and souls linger—in the world's great museums and in the sacred spaces we call home."
"Every place begins with memory and movement"
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