{"id":11173,"date":"2022-01-07T15:06:04","date_gmt":"2022-01-07T15:06:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media-archive.blackartinamerica.com\/?p=11173"},"modified":"2022-01-07T15:33:52","modified_gmt":"2022-01-07T15:33:52","slug":"the-inspired-artistic-footprint-of-ann-sole-sister-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthexhibitions.org\/media-archive\/?p=11173","title":{"rendered":"The Inspired Artistic Footprint of Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

The Inspired Artistic Footprint of Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson<\/h2>\r\n
by D. Amari Jackson<\/pre>\r\n
The innovators. The ones who see things differently. The rare few who disrupt the traditional and the mundane in breathtaking ways and, in doing so, challenge the long-established cultural practices surrounding them, before reimagining them, transforming them into something compelling and \u201cnew,” despite being there all along, hidden in plain sight, yet waiting to be rediscovered by one bold enough to look at the same old thing in a whole new way.<\/p>\r\n
For Ann ‘Sole Sister’ Johnson, such innovation was right at her feet. Three decades ago, while taking art courses at a Texas junior college, she stumbled across her artistic trademark. \u201cI took a painting class and that\u2019s when I stepped in some paint,\u201d says Johnson, a mixed-media artist based in the Houston area. Though artistic throughout her early years, \u201cthat was when I started painting with my feet,\u201d she notes. \u201cAnd that\u2019s where the \u2018Sole Sister\u2019 name comes from.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
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PLANTATION LULLABY, 2019
Intaglio, Found Objects
6×18\u201d<\/p><\/div>\r\n
\u201cI thought it looked cool,\u201d continues Johnson, who proceeded to paint her first self-portrait with her feet. \u201cI just kept playing around with it and started painting on different surfaces like wood, which is different from painting on canvas,\u201d she explains. \u201cThen I just focused on it so I could master where to put footprints and how to go back in and detail with my fingers around the eyes so that it could be less raw and more refined.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
Rare talent acknowledged, Johnson\u2019s numerous professional feats go beyond just her feet. The hands-on painter, sculptor, and printmaker has been showcased in solo, group, and juried exhibitions in major museums and galleries throughout the country. Johnson\u2019s work, which largely examines issues relevant to Black life and representation, has garnered awards from the likes of Houston\u2019s \u201cThe Big Show,\u201d the Carroll Harris Simms National Black Art Competition, and the Texas Biennial. Pegged an \u201cArtist to Watch\u201d by the International Review of African American Art for her experimental printmaking, Johnson has also published articles for art magazines and penned and designed several books. Since 1995, she has taught art, merchandising, and design at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black land-grant university and the second oldest public institution of higher learning in the state. The popular professor has been recognized with a Teaching Excellence Award, a Presidents Faculty of the Year award, and an Art Teacher of the Year award from the university\u2019s School of Architecture.<\/p>\r\n
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BONDED, 2019
Intaglio on Sycamore Leaf
6×8\u201d<\/p><\/div>\r\n
\u201cAnn is an amazing educator,\u201d offers colleague, professor, and artist, Rab\u00e9a Ballin. \u201cShe always puts her students first, and she does so much for them, almost like a mother figure. She just has a nurturing aspect to her personality that, I feel, is infused in the work she makes, because it is so labor intensive.\u201d In artistic terms, continues Ballin, \u201cAnn is always cooking something up with the printmaking and her commitment to process, and it speaks to the organized and very thorough nature of her personality. A lot of her work is conceptual, so it is based on a lot of research, and I really want to speak to and honor her thoroughness when it comes to the work she makes.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
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Like her talented toes, Johnson has forged a remarkable trail, one stretching across the Atlantic, back to London, England where she was born into a military family that, at age three, jumped the pond to settle in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Heavily influenced by her mother, an oil painter and avid gardener, and further shaped by an activist, military father who championed the effort to make Martin Luther King day a holiday in Wyoming, Johnson absorbed her parents\u2019 penchant for creativity and social justice while figuring out her own path in life. She initially pursued fashion instead of art, attending Bauder Fashion College in Arlington, TX, largely because she believed she couldn\u2019t measure up with the latter.<\/p>\r\n
\u201cI never thought I was good enough to major in art,\u201d reveals Johnson, before describing how the rodeo was a \u201cbig deal\u201d in Wyoming. In art competitions, \u201cthe kids would be drawing boots and cows while I\u2019m drawing Tina Turner and Prince,\u201d she recalls, with a laugh. \u201cSo I would never place.\u201d It wasn\u2019t until Johnson attended Prairie View A&M that she recognized art as her true talent and found a mentor and a collegiate environment more conducive to her skills. \u201cArt was always my passion,\u201d she clarifies. \u201cI just was afraid of it.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
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Upon graduating from college in 1991, Johnson pursued and received an MA in Humanities from the University of Houston-Clear Lake with a concentration in art. She began teaching art at her collegiate alma mater, simultaneously exhibiting and engaging her Houston-area community in such initiatives as public mural projects with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and art-based summer programs for children. For eight years, under Project Row Houses, Johnson taught arts and crafts to youth each summer while establishing the African American Art Festival Children\u2019s Village. In 2002, she launched RAW Kids Mobile Art Camps to further serve her Houston community before pursuing and receiving her MFA from The Academy of Art University in San Francisco with a concentration in printmaking.<\/p>\r\n
Such community engagement and service are wholly consistent with Johnson\u2019s identification with the \u201cartivist\u201d tag. She is primarily focused on activism and printmaking these days, given her last foot-felt portrait of a newly elected President Obama was rendered in 2009.<\/p>\r\n
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OCTOROON \u2026from the auction block series 2021
Intaglio, on Raw Cotton, Transfer Print, Fabric, Found Objects
10x10x6\u201d<\/p><\/div>\r\n
\u201cI always say that everybody ain\u2019t built for the streets,\u201d stresses Johnson, noting that a wise person \u201conce told me to use your art as your activism.\u201d She references ongoing police killings of unarmed Black citizens and the July 2015 death of Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old African American woman found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas three days after being arrested during a traffic stop. \u201cThat\u2019s my backyard,\u201d reports Johnson. \u201cThat was my campus where that happened, and I just can\u2019t begin to tell you what it feels like to drive down a street you\u2019ve been driving down for 20 years, but now you\u2019re a nervous wreck, and your hands are shaking driving down that same street. So, obviously, it\u2019s gonna have an impact, either consciously or unconsciously, on the work that\u2019s created.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
Accordingly, Johnson produced a series of artistic sunglasses called You Can’t See What I Can See<\/em>, in response to the decisions to not charge law enforcement officials for these killings. The first pair of sunglasses, a transfer print of a mother grieving her son, was titled, \u201cIt Just Keeps Happening.\u201d In the aftermath of Bland\u2019s death, Johnson curated an exhibition focused on women and brutality called How Do I Say Her Name<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n
Johnson is also an active member of ROUX, a southern artist collective that contributes to the discourse of contemporary printmaking through the employment of both traditional and experimental methods. Composed of Johnson, Rab\u00e9a Ballin, Delita Martin, and Lovie Olivia, the ROUX collective promotes diverse works that navigate between styles of the past and the proposed future while addressing issues of representation and experiences unique to women of color in the American South.<\/p>\r\n
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STOP ERASING MY EXISITENCE \u2026from the auction block series 2021
Intaglio, on Raw Cotton, Transfer Print, Fabric, Found Objects
10x10x6\u201d<\/p><\/div>\r\n
But for all her ongoing artivism, it is ultimately her 84-year-old mother, Thelma, who keeps Johnson on her toes. \u201cShe\u2019s every<\/em> woman,\u201d laughs Johnson, pointing to her mother\u2019s numerous skills including art, gardening, making clothes and hats. \u201cI have always been inspired by her artistically,\u201d Johnson told the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute in a January 2021 talk. \u201cA couple of years ago, at the Community Artists\u2019 Collective, she and I had a show together, and it was great.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
\u201cBut she was coming for me.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
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Amari Jackson<\/b> is\u00a0a creator, author, TV\/web\/film producer, and award-winning journalist. He is author of the 2011 novel, The Savion Sequence<\/i>; creator\/writer\/coproducer of the 2012-2014 web series\u00a0The Book Look<\/i>; writer\/coproducer of the 2016 film\u00a0Edge of the Pier<\/i>; and current writer\/coproducer of\u00a0Listen Up!<\/i>\u00a0on HBCU GO\/Roku TV. He is a former Chief of Staff for a NJ State Senator; a former VP of Communications & Development for the Jamestown Project at Harvard University; and a recipient of several writing fellowships including the George Washington Williams Fellowship from the Independent Press Association. An active ghost writer, song writer, martial artist, and journalist, his writings have appeared in a wide variety of national and regional publications.<\/p>\r\n
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