John K. Lawson

Lawson's art and poetry are published regularly in the Berkshire Edge and Country Roads in the USA. Lawson's third collection of poems, Zombie Love, has a release date of January 2020, with the final touches being added on Bodmin Moor.

His newest illuminated book, Swamp Blues Men, is a collaboration with the historical West Baton Rouge museum in Louisiana and features collage portraits and poems along with leading historical backgrounds on some of the musical legends who shaped modern music and is scheduled for release October 2019.

In 2016 and 2017 he collaborated with students from the Plymouth School of Art and Design on a piece commemorating the Plymouth 2020. John is currently living in South Louisiana where he also recently finished two years as the artist in residence at the newly opened Knock Knock Children’s Museum in Baton Rouge, where 350,000 museum visitors worked with his creative practice.

Lawson's collection of beads were among the few possessions that survived the destruction of Hurricane Katrina (August 2005). He and his wife, Aimee (who is the cousin of author Andre Dubus III), lost their home and his adjacent art studio to the storm. Before Hurricane Katrina, Lawson’s primary medium were his trade mark Mardi Gras beads, picked up from the streets on mornings after the parades and parties New Orleans is famous for. After Hurricane Katrina, he began creating series of palimpsests, using drawings, sketches, photographs and personal documents collected over 25 years, which he had salvaged from his flood damaged New Orleans home and studio, and began recycling them combining xerox, ink and the encaustic process. Buildings damaged by flood waters post-Hurricane Katrina became the subject of a series of architectural photographs, including the Western Union Building and the Maritime Building in New Orleans.

The loss of Lawson's home and studio in Hurricane Katrina (while living in New Orleans, Summer 2005) along with 25 years of art work and writing is the focus of his 2007 novel, Hurricane Hotel and his two full length poetry collections; Now and A Map of Sorts. His two previous illuminated art books, Figures in Jazz and Maker Rebirth, combine his poetry and visual art in provocative dialogue.

In 2004 John K. Lawson was featured in the documentary film, which follows the story of Mardi Gras beads from their manufacture in factories in China, to their use at Mardi Gras parades, and their transition in the hands of John K. Lawson into fine art pieces hanging in New York galleries. The LA Times wrote of the movie: "Cleverly juxtaposes the apex of American bacchanalian excess with the sweatshop-like conditions that facilitate the fun." The film earned 21 national and international awards, including a nomination for the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and was a New York Times' "Critics Pick" by Stephen Holden.

John K. Lawson aka JKL (born 1962 in Birmingham, England) is an American Contemporary visual artist and poet, also known as the "Hieronymus Bosch of Beads," and is known for using salvaged Mardi Gras beads and items reclaimed from the destruction left by Hurricane Katrina in his art.