John Brooks is an artist, poet, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Brooks’ expressionistic paintings and drawings often depict his friends, as well as figures and sites sourced from historic and found photographs. He combines images “to create what I think of as the hint of a new narrative.” His recent suite of portraits and tableaux, some with a circus or theatrical setting, are “charged with a sense of longing, remote desire, empathy, as well as a kind of existential openness.”
Brooks earned his B.A. from College of Charleston in South Carolina (2000). A solo exhibition, Islands Are Not Forever, will be on view this winter in Cincinnati, at The Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery. His solo exhibition, if the Lovers are Losers, was at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Winston-Salem (2024); as well as solo shows with MARCH, New York City (2024), Moremen Gallery, Louisville, KY (2023), and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (2022). His paintings and drawings were included in group exhibitions at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (2025), The Box, LA (2025), Anat Ebgi (2025), flatmarkus, Zurich (2025); Michael Warren Contemporary (2025), Denver; Speed Museum, Louisville, KY (2024); UTA Artist Space, and Noon Projects, in Los Angeles (2024), ES49, in Vienna, Austria (2024); Shapin Nicolas Art Project, Louisville, KY and Bolivar Art Gallery at University of Kentucky, Lexington (2024).
Paintings and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Grinnell College Museum of Art, Iowa; The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, FL. Publications such as The New Yorker, Texte zur Kunst, Weltkunst, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, Buds Digest, Golf Digest, and Action, Spectacle have included his paintings and drawings. Brooks’ poems have been published in The Cortland Review, Appalachian Review, Pilot Press, Good River Review, Assaracus, East by Northeast, Lit Angels, and Plainsongs.
Over the last two decades, Brooks spent several years living in London and Chicago, but was based primarily in Louisville, Kentucky, where from 2017-2022 he operated Quappi Projects, curating twenty-five exhibitions. In 2025, he launched Other Swans, a digital journal featuring interviews with creatives.