Loni Johnson’s Altar-making workshop invites guests to utilize meaningful objects —such as photographs, memorabilia, crystals, and jewelry, and more — to build small altars as offerings to their ancestors. Loni Johnson will guide participants to contemplate how we claim, navigate, and hold space; how ancestral and historical memory informs where, when, and how we occupy spaces; and how we carry and honor our ancestors in the spaces we move through.
Participants can keep their objects or can opt to include them to become part of an alter installation temporarily displayed at Goulds Park, which will remain up and viewable to the public for two weeks.
Johnson participated in BFI’s Heat Exchange Residency program in 2022, spending a month in Norway researching arts infrastructure through site visits and meetings with key artists who initiate education programs, unions, artist run residencies, artist run spaces, design practices, and more in Stavanger, Utsira, and Oslo.
In 2023, Kristina Ketola Bore, Curator at the Stavanger Kunsthalle invited Johnson to coordinate a workshop series to empower and amplify the voices of the youth in Stavanger. This initiative came directly from introductions made as part of Heat Exchange, bringing Johnson and Chire Regans, both Oolite Social Justice award winners, back to Norway to further their artwork. The workshop inspired Norwegian youth to begin to consider the role of art and artists within the framework of Social Justice and how they define Social Justice for themselves. Once they began to think about what Social Justice meant to them personally, they could reimagine what their roles are and consider what concerns them in their communities and start to create ways to impact and confront these issues. They can consider art as a tool to utilize to activate change.
Bringing this project to Norwegian youth anchored the importance of prioritizing the community Johnson grew up in, where she continues to live and create empowering educational art initiatives. Siting this project at Goulds Park anchors long term work Johnson has been doing for her community, sharing new modalities amplified by her international experiences.
About the Artists:
Loni Johnson is a multi-disciplinary visual artist born and raised in Miami, FL. As an artist, educator, mother, and activist, Johnson understands that as artists, there is a cyclical obligation to give back and nurture our communities with her creative gift and it must be utilized to better our world. Through movement and ritual, the artist creates healing spaces for Black women and explores how ancestral and historical memory informs how, when and where we enter and claim spaces.
Selected exhibitions and performances include: As We Move Forward at Augusta Savage Gallery, Amherst MA(2024), Making Miami Design District, Miami(2023), Biscayne at Kampong Gardens, Coconut Grove(2023), Asake: A Conversation with self at 74th and Collins Oolite’s Walgreens storefront, Miami Beach(2023), Remnants at Locust Projects, Miami, Making Visible: The Studio Archives of Chire Regans and Loni Johnson, WAAM at Dimensions Variable, Miami (2020); Say Their Names, Chire Regans/Vanta Black Memorial Mural Project Unveiling, Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami (2020); Performans Fanm/Global Borderless Caribbean XII: Focus Miami, Little Haiti Cultural Arts Center, Miami (2020); Homegoing, NADA Art Fair, Miami (2017); Offerings III, Bas Fisher Invitational and O’Miami, Miami (2017); Offerings II, Common Field Convening, Miami (2016).
Johnson is the Lead Coordinator of Art Detectives, an arts education program rooted in the framework of Social Justice at Perez Art Museum(PAMM) Miami, Prevention Coordinator of youth arts prevention program at Concept Health Systems, and Chairperson for the National Visual Arts Selection Panel for National YoungArts Foundation. She is also one of the founders of Miami Melanated Arts, a collective of Black artists who are creating space to reimagine what effective and impactful Arts ecosystems in South Florida could be.
