BIO

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      Robert E. Johnson was born 1969 in Laurel Mississippi and raised on Chicago’s Southside. His love for art and music has been a lifelong journey. As a child his grandmother Naomi C. Johnson regularly brought him on outings to the South Side Community Art Center and Art Institute of Chicago. Due to these outings Johnson decided he possessed what it took to become an artist. He continued making art throughout his childhood and teenage years. In 1988 he briefly enrolled at Central State University majoring in art.  After withdrawing from college in 1993, Johnson focused his energy on renovating his house in Xenia, Ohio.  This is when he began his reverse glass paintings on Windows. He became fascinated with the old windows he had replaced, and how their glass kept paint fresh and vivid. After losing the home to foreclosure in 1997, he subsequently moved back to Chicago.

       

      Johnson’s drug use began once he returned to Chicago, a habit exacerbated by the deaths of his grandfather Robert E. Johnson the Associate Publisher and Executive Editor of Jet Magazine in 1995, and his aunt Atty. Janet Johnson Grant in 2003. Johnson found a home for his art practice at the historic South Side Community Art Center in 2003. Where he taught, had a studio, and found an energetic, talented and supportive community of Black artists. His work earned him support from collectors Dan Parker, Patric McCoy, and other members of Diasporal Rhythms, a group of passionate collectors of art by contemporary artists from the African Diaspora. 

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      In 2007, Johnson began his road to recovery and enlisted in the military as an Army mechanic. While on active duty, he continued to create. He started with color sketches and later explored digital mixed media with sound and video. Both were easy to transport and adapt to military life. During this period, he incorporated his military experience as a central subject of his work. In two series, Deployment = Creativity and Knocking Away the Rust, he collaged "E.T.M.'s", Electronic Training Manuals, and snapshots of friends with vivid color and patterns. The series explored the tedium and structure of military deployment during the Iraq War.

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      Following medical retirement in 2013, Johnson moved to Colorado and began adjusting to civilian life. He returned to Chicago in 2017 to care for his ailing mother and grandmother. While receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, the Veterans Administration encouraged him to pursue art therapy, rekindling his passion for creating. When asked about what it was like to make art again, he said, "I found an old friend, who had been waiting for me." Currently, Johnson lives in Hyde Park, Chicago, where he has a studio. He creates works in digital mixed media, merged canvas paintings, collage and continues to produce new works for his Window series.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

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      My practice embodies abstract expressionism's immediacy, and weaves it with mixed media, and found objects, to create a transcendental tension between the present and the past. By combining techniques from graffiti to figural abstraction and surrealist collage, my work meditates on, and challenges, western artistic norms. 

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Robert E. Johnson CV​

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