Bio an Artist Statement
Johanna is a portrait and figurative painter based in Montclair, New Jersey. Working largely in oil, her art practice speaks to her interests in the interrelated themes of identity, dignity, devotion, power and resistance, and the resilience of the human spirit. Prior to studying painting, she trained as a sociologist of social inequalities and continues to live in the ever-shifting, fluid and often marginalized social locations that exist between and within academia, activism, and art.
In these spaces, she is drawn to the canvas by grief and longing, both in a highly personal sense of her own life history, and in the sense of the fraught trajectories of contemporary U.S. society in its disastrous turn toward unchecked racialized and gendered capitalism, hyper-rationalization, and unveiled neo-fascism. She is compelled to paint her friends, family, and people in her community that she cares about very deeply. She paints to relate to them and with them, to bring them- and a quality of our shared humanity- into focus. She paints people to have them near, to celebrate them, to wish them joy, to protect them, to ward off her fears for them, and to remember them. In this way, both the act of painting, and the themes she engages, create a space for her to cope, heal, and resist.
Johanna is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting and Drawing from New Jersey City University, and previously studied portraiture at the Yard School of Art in Montclair. She is also an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Helen Bennett McMurray Endowed Chair of Social Ethics at Monmouth University, and a collaborator on community initiatives led by justice-involved activists in her role as facilitator of the MU Academic Exchange in Prison Project (MU-AEP).