Sue Johnson

Sue Johnson received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Columbia University in New York and her BFA in Painting from Syracuse University. Johnson lectures widely on her work and has held numerous teaching positions. She is currently Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Johnson is a multi-media artist. She combines installation, drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, found objects, and artists books to create works that interrogate received historical and cultural narratives. Johnson frequently collaborates with institutions on research-based exhibitions. She has developed work with the American Philosophical Society Museum (Philadelphia, PA), the Pitt-Rivers Museum (University of Oxford, UK), and The Rosenbach Museum and Library (Philadelphia, PA).

Johnson has been awarded grants from numerous arts organizations, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and four Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council. She has participated in residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Studios at MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the City of Salzburg/Salzburg Kunstlerhaus Residency Fellowship, among others.

Johnson is known for her decades-old project, The Alternate Encyclopedia; an evolving work that explores contemporary society through an investigation of the past, linking common cultural icons with their historical counterparts in large-scale installations. During her Arts/Industry Pottery residency, Johnson created components in slip-cast china that were incorporated into The Alternate Encyclopedia project.