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“This is the only concern of the artist: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”  -James Baldwin

How does an artist transform matter and transcend the ordinary? "The Alchemists" offers artists who construct unique forms rooted in black experience and ancestral legacy to demonstrate that this magic can indeed be done. Featuring works across a wide range of mediums, including painting, drawing, video, collage, assemblage, and installation, this exhibition aims to function as a critical platform for the manifestation of Black folks thinking thier way through blackness, and formally documenting black material and ideological culture.

Johnson Lowe Gallery has long been interested in the influence of source materials and the creative process of constructing, reimagining, appropriating, and rendering such materials, both natural and artificial into unanticipated forms. In physics, the term transmutation refers to the conversion of one elemen into another. Though transmutation can also refer to radioactive decay, ancient Alchemists continuously aimed to create precious metals, or some ideal of a universal elixir, in their quests for wealth, longevity, and immortality. But they never had the source material of blackness. We do.