
John Edmonds (AY26)
John Edmonds is an American artist and photographer who earned his MFA in Photography from Yale University and his BFA in Photography from the Corcoran School of Art & Design. His work explores themes of identity, community, love, mortality and belonging. Trained as a photographer, Edmonds works with film, sculpture and text to interrupt the seriality of the photographic medium and challenge image legibility. His recent solo and two-person exhibitions include One, Maximilian William Gallery, London, UK (2024); Natural World, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH (2022); John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance, FOAM Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2022) and Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2020-2021) and Between Pathos & Seduction, Company Gallery, New York, NY (2019). Edmonds is the recipient of a Pollack-Krasner Award (2023-2024), The FOAM Paul Huf Award (2021) and the UOVO Prize (2020). Noted for his highly formalist photographs, in which he focuses on the performative gestures and self-fashioning of young Black men on the streets of America, his work is in numerous public and private collections, which include the Brooklyn Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, the Rubell Collection, the National Gallery of Art, the RISD Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Yale University Art Gallery. In 2019, he was included in the 79th Whitney Biennial. Edmonds has taught at Harvard University, the School of Visual Arts and has served as Visiting Critic in Photography at Yale University. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.