Khari Turner

Khari Turner (born April 26, 1991, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American painter and multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores Black identity, ancestry, memory, spirituality, environmental history, and the relationship between Black people and water. Combining figuration and abstraction, Turner constructs images in which fragments of Black bodies—particularly faces, mouths, noses, hands, and silhouettes—emerge from and dissolve into fluid fields of color. Central to his practice is his use of water collected from oceans, rivers, lakes, and other sites carrying personal or historical connections to Black life, which he mixes directly into ink and paint or pours across his surfaces.  Growing up in Milwaukee near Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee River strongly shaped Turner’s relationship to water. He has described water as both material and historical archive: a substance shared by living people, ancestors, and future generations. He has collected water from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Senegalese coast, Lake Michigan, the Milwaukee River, New York Harbor, and other locations associated with Black history and migration. Through these materials, Turner addresses the transatlantic slave trade and Middle Passage without centering Black suffering alone, instead emphasizing survival, joy, beauty, vulnerability, transformation, and spiritual continuity.  Turner’s recent practice has expanded beyond conventional canvas painting into sculpture, concrete, sand, shells, coral, stained glass, wood, and other materials. His developing mythology Magava imagines an embodied drop of water whose journey through oceans, clouds, rain, rivers, and human bodies becomes a metaphor for migration, transformation, return, and the possibility that water itself might possess memory or spirit. The name Magava refers in the project to “I shall return,” and the narrative allows Turner to extend his investigation of water from historical material into speculative world-building. Turner earned a BFA in Studio Art from Austin Peay State University in 2019 and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2021. His work has been presented at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Texas State Galleries, European Cultural Centre in Venice, CFHILL in Stockholm, Ross-Sutton Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Red Arrow Gallery, Voss Gallery, Iris Project, Superposition Gallery, Christie’s, and other venues internationally. He was a 2023 AIRIE Fellow in Everglades National Park, where the ecology and history of South Florida expanded his thinking about water, Black migration, and landscape. Turner lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.