Let Me Fix Your Crown – Germane Barnes

Nina Johnson is pleased to present Let Me Fix Your Crown, an ambitious multidisciplinary exhibition of new works by Miami-based, Chicago-born artist Germane Barnes. Informed by recent travels to Morocco, Nigeria, and Egypt, the exhibition explores migration, identity, politics, and the many forms royalty can assume. While traveling from Cairo along the Nile, Barnes found himself thinking about grandeur, kings, and pharaohs, and began considering these ideas alongside the rituals and objects of everyday life: hair, gatherings, and domestic space. Across the exhibition, Barnes locates a sense of royalty in both the objects we possess and the things we hold more intimately. On the far-left space of the library is the exhibition's largest work: a five-by-five-foot, intricately detailed model of Barnes's upcoming exhibition design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), highlighting the work of Paul R. Williams, whom Barnes considers a "King of Architecture." Displayed among the surrounding library shelves is a series of fired ceramic gourds, vessels, and small objects. Barnes's first professional foray into ceramics, the series responds directly to the space and its shelving, reminiscent of the principles of Japanese joinery. Long fascinated by anime and manga, interests he cites as influential in his decision to become an architect, Barnes studied Japanese ceramics while developing the works. The pieces incorporate royal color palettes drawn from Asia and West Africa, while embracing the dried, almost orange appearance of unglazed clay. Occupying the central wall of the exhibition space is The Crown House, a three-by-three-foot drawing depicting a house inspired by the elaborate church hats traditionally worn by Black women on Sundays. Continuing the exhibition's exploration of the crown as a symbol of royalty, Barnes translates the hat's form into domestic architecture. The work also draws from Barnes's time in Los Angeles and the Case Study Houses, the influential midcentury program in which modernist architects designed experimental homes around particular ways of living. Barnes began considering what his own Case Study House might look like through the perspective of someone from the American South, and how that point of view might reshape conventional ideas of domestic space. On the far-right side of the gallery, a grid of approximately twenty eight-by-eight-inch collages returns to the crown, this time through vintage barbershop signs depicting rows of hairstyles. Drawing on Barnes's established collage practice, the series is organized around four themes: physical features, objects, gatherings, and Africa. Pulling from seemingly disparate sources, including proms, bounce houses, gold jewelry, plastic couch covers, decorative hats, and Easter suits, Barnes brings the iconography of Black American life into conversation with its historical and cultural ties to African royalty. Together, the works offer a regal portrait of the everyday, locating power and dignity within familiar rituals, objects, and gestures. Germane Barnes: Let Me Fix Your Crown is on view in the Exhibition Library through January 30, 2027.