Khari Turner (b. 1991, Milwaukee, WI) is an American artist based in New York, NY. For Turner, growing up in Milwaukee created a relationship to Black people, water, and his environment that plays a major role in his work now. His practice involves sourcing materials directly from different bodies of water including the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, his hometown’s Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee River. His aims are to eventually start work directly related to water health, environmental conservation, and bringing art to low-income neighbourhoods.



“My work right now is a diary of struggle and overcoming struggle. I’m exploring the history of black defeat, black revolutions, and black accomplishments coalescing through mark making, realism, and expressionism. I pull from my life growing up in Milwaukee, WI. My ambitions are to render my connection to blackness and to have a conversation about black issues without creating images displaying the pain black people have gone through or go through. This is the duality I want to put into the work. The noses and lips of black skin represent my history and connection to my heritage, but they also represent the fact that people with wider noses, thicker lips, and darker skin statistically getting longer prison sentences in the US and this positive and negative is what drive the point of the work.”