The Long Road to Recognition

Stella Jones Gallery presents Joseph Lofton and John Lister III, artists whose practices span generations while remaining deeply engaged with questions of power, identity, and visual language within the African Diaspora.

Joseph Lofton’s distinguished career reflects a sustained commitment to intercultural exchange and painterly experimentation. Trained in New York at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts, where he worked alongside figures such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Lofton later relocated to Mexico and became part of a vital artistic community that included Elizabeth Catlett and Francisco Mora. His work merges abstraction, figuration, and rhythmic pattern, often incorporating narrow strips of painted canvas that introduce texture and subtle collage effects. Across decades, Lofton has developed a visual language that feels both formally rigorous and spiritually resonant, situating him as a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and contemporary diasporic aesthetics.

In dialogue with Lofton’s legacy, John Lister III represents a rising voice in contemporary painting. Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and classically trained at Morgan State University and Bowie State University, Lister combines expressive figuration with symbolism drawn from history, religion, anatomy, and popular culture. He describes his practice as “Post-Neo Expressionism,” a hybrid approach informed by Cubism, abstraction, and Neo-Expressionist intensity. Recurring motifs—crowns, medical imagery, heroic figures, and iconography from African and diasporic traditions—reframe narratives of Black sovereignty and self-determination. His work is held in private collections and in the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art.