BIO

Charles Joyner layers and melds photographs, textiles, colored shapes, and symbols in his collages, boldly revealing his creative journey. Born in rural eastern North Carolina, Joyner describes his work as a “transparency” of his upbringing and study of Ghanaian culture. His subjects intersect African and African American cultures and embrace Black folk traditions of North Carolina’s Coastal Plain region, and subjects drawn from his extensive travels in Ghana, West Africa. Joyner’s vibrant multi-layered works pay tribute to the ancestry, rituals, religion, and spirituality permeating Ghanaian communities and convey his own cross-cultural connections. Throughout his career, Charles Joyner has looked to Romare Bearden (1911-1988) for inspirations. The visionary chronicler of African American experience once asserted, “If you’re any kind of artist, you make a miraculous journey, and you come back and make some statements in shapes and colors of where you were.”