Gallerist Donovan Johnson Is at the Forefront of Atlanta’s Thriving Art Scene

Donovan Johnson first set foot in Atlanta’s esteemed Bill Lowe Gallery at age 18. The summer before his freshman year of college, Johnson walked into a show featuring works by the renowned American artist Thornton Dial—and, to this day, Johnson cites this moment as his “first true art experience.”

Little did Johnson know that the visit would kickstart his decade-long association with the gallery, a pillar of Atlanta’s contemporary art world since it was founded in 1989. “My entry point wasn’t academia—it was purely emotional and spiritual,” Johnson told Artsy over coffee in the gallery, which is located in Atlanta’s art-focused cul-de-sac, Miami Circle.

Now aged 30, Johnson is at the helm of the gallery he once admired as a teenager. After Lowe passed away in December 2021, Johnson—who was then the director—stepped in to fill his mentor’s shoes. With the gallery’s reopening in March 2023, Johnson integrated his vision with Lowe’s, symbolically renaming the gallery to Johnson Lowe Gallery. He quickly captured the attention of both local and national collectors with a program that aims to diversify the art market in Atlanta.

And as Atlanta’s star continues to rise in the global art market, Johnson intends to help solidify the city’s place on the map. Johnson embraces the inevitable ebbs and flows as the city undergoes notable changes, from new art fairs to increased international attention.

“I’m not interested in rigidly defining the program of the gallery for anyone or anything,” Johnson said. “The most important part for me is a proper representation of where we are in the city—I feel an allegiance to Atlanta in that way.”

“Traditional avenues of education were never the best way for me to learn,” said Johnson. His first month as an intern at Bill Lowe Gallery coincided with his first month of college at Georgia State University in August 2012. In those early days, Johnson remembers that Lowe “imagined the galleries as part-gallery, part-temple, part–music video,” where “the work was always both cinematic and spiritual.” During this time, the gallery was known for showing work by Georgia-based artists Jimmy O’Neal, Maggie Hasbrouck, and Herbert Creecy—all of whom the gallery still represents.

Johnson wore many hats at the gallery: intern, sales manager, and director. He left twice, first to help care for his niece in Texas and again for a short stint in New York, where he came to admire the city’s tight-knit gallery scene and slate of diverse shows. “One of the things that I loved about being in New York…was that I could walk into a show of artists from the other side of the planet, and then walk into the next gallery and an artist is showing who lives two doors down from me,” he said.

Johnson returned to Bill Lowe Gallery in 2019 and, by December, had taken up the position of director. This homecoming underscored a pivotal shift in his career and perspective, where he drew inspiration from Lowe’s uncompromising commitment to the gallery’s vision.

“Bill could do it the way that he wanted to do it,” Johnson said. “He didn’t have to abide by anyone else’s rules. And I don’t have to abide by anybody else’s standards, either. I’m finding a middle ground between what Bill was doing and my experience of galleries outside of Atlanta.”

When Lowe suddenly passed away from lymphoma in 2021, Johnson stepped up to carry the torch for his mentor and old friend. The 2022 programming paid homage to the late gallerist’s 32-year tenure with five shows featuring gallery artists. Then, in the spring of 2023, Johnson decided to rebrand the gallery to Johnson Lowe Gallery, a name that intended to carry Lowe’s legacy while announcing a new chapter for the gallerist and the city.

“The Alchemists,” the gallery’s inaugural show as Johnson Lowe Gallery, marked the first time the gallery featured art by exclusively Black artists—other than the Dial solo show. This exhibition integrated the work of Atlanta artists, including William Downs and Shanequa Gay, with that of internationally renowned figures like Mark Bradford, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Layo Bright, among others.

“It became a part of the gallery program because I was challenged to find a way to merge Bill’s vision with what I wanted the vision of the gallery to be moving forward,” said Johnson. “The gallery has always really been, as Bill used to call it, ‘a portal to global visual culture,’ and I wanted to make good on that.”

Since then, the gallerist has staged seven exhibitions, ranging from a group exhibition featuring seven local Atlanta artists to a solo exhibition of acclaimed London-born sculptor Judy Pfaff.

Johnson’s programming is as ambitious as it is intensive for a gallery of his size: During last month’s inaugural Atlanta Art Fair on October 3rd, Johnson orchestrated three simultaneous openings in the gallery featuring the art of Cosmo Whyte, Ashante Kindle, and Fahamu Pecou. All the while, he kept his phone ready to lend guidance to the art handlers at the gallery’s booth across town. Each space was packed shoulder-to-shoulder.

As a new gallery owner, Johnson also sits at the forefront of Atlanta’s bubbling art scene. He tells Artsy that experimental art and “edgy dealers” are not new to the city, yet the broader art world is only slowly catching on.

“The way that Atlanta is spoken about in the press, which is how people formulate their ideas about this city, is interesting to me because so much of the narrative seems as if things are springing up out of Atlanta out of nowhere or just developing really rapidly when that’s not necessarily the case,” Johnson said. “Atlanta has always been an extremely multicultural and multigenerational arts community. It’s just that the rest of the world is now catching up to what’s going on here.”