Khari Turner

The Light Between Oceans

- Doug Gillen

“If I met my ancestors at the edge of the ocean, would I bring flowers?” What a natural notion to posit, a sentiment to be etched in stone and passed down through the ages. When Milwaukee-born, NYC-based painter Khari Turner considered this simple, rhetorical question during our interview, in what was personally and professionally a lightswitch moment while musing about his painting, a shared clarity arrived. It’s true, I’ve thought about this concept over and over again: If I met my ancestors at the edge of the ocean, would I bring flowers? How would that appear? What does a meeting of bodies of water even look like?

But that’s just one aspect of his journey. A botched financial aid mishap followed by a scholarship and unlikely gig as a cheerleader at Austin Peay State University, working as one of those incredible high-flying stunt slam dunkers with the Milwaukee Bucks, and then onward to NYC and Columbia, each experience hydro-powered into a flourishing art career, yet another unique passage Turner has traversed over the course of a young life. Over the past few years, he has explored the properties of water as means of transportation, navigation, and life force, as well as art material, creating some of the most powerful paintings we have seen. While the first encounter is literally and figuratively stunning, a deep dive discloses that Turner is immersed in a personal, universal quest, exploring family, names, identity and home. —Evan Pricco

Doug Gillen: What’s your idea of Milwaukee art?