"Mining the archive is like building a time machine; I look at the material culture of the past as a way of understanding what has come into being in our contemporary times."
Susan R. Johnson (American, born San Francisco, CA) lives and works in Richmond, VA and St. Mary's City, MD. She earned an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Columbia University and a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University, studying art in London, England and Florence, Italy with Syracuse University.
Johnson's artworks and multiple media installations are revisionist in method creating plausible fictions that run both parallel and counter to canonical histories. Works combine installation, painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, textiles, found objects and artist books. Projects focus on topics that include the origins of museums, cabinets of curiosities and “lost” collections, the picturing of nature and women, the domestic universe and consumer culture – and collectively, defy easy categorization.
She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, NEA/Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Virginia Commission for the Arts, Maryland State Arts Council and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Selected residency fellowships include the Arts/Industry Program of the John Michael Kohler Art Center, MacDowell, Millay Arts, Art Omi, Golden Foundation Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, City of Salzburg/Salzburg Kunstlerhaus, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, Frans Masereel Centrum, I-Park Foundation, Jentel Foundation, and CAMAC/Centre D'Art Marnay Art Centre. Library research residencies at the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society and most recently at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. Johnson served as Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at the Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies in Oxford, England in 2010-11, and has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2011 and 2015.
Her work has been the subject of over forty one-person exhibitions at venues that include the Tweed Museum of Art (Duluth, MN), Pitt-Rivers Museum (University of Oxford, UK), The Rosenbach Museum and Library (Philadelphia, PA), Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum (Salisbury, UK), American Philosophical Society Museum (Philadelphia, PA), neptune & brown (Washington, DC), Jan Cicero Gallery (Chicago, IL), Eleanor D. Wilson Museum of Hollins University (Roanoke, VA), Brooklyn Botanic Garden (Brooklyn, NY), Midwest Museum of American Art (Elkhart, IN), Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA), Anderson Gallery/VCU (Richmond, VA), VisArts (Rockville, MD), Walton Art Center (Fayetteville, AR), University of Memphis (Memphis, TN), and University of Richmond Museums (Richmond, VA). Reviews of her work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Art Examiner, Partisan Review, The DisCerning Eye, and Art Papers.
