Margaret K. Johnson

Contact the artist:
The Williams Gallery of Fine Art (wmgallery.com)
The Tolman Collection, Tokyo (tolmantokyo.com)
Verne Collection (vernegallery.com)
Black Mountain College Project (bmcproject.org)

Margaret Kennard Johnson has a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY; a Master of Design from The School of Architecture and Design, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She studied Basic Design with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, NC.

Johnson lived for 8 and 1/2 years in Japan where she co-authored the book "JAPANESE PRINTS TODAY: TRADITION WITH INNOVATION".

She has taught at Drake University, Texas State College for Women, Pratt Institute, and for more than 20 years at The Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY. In New Jersey she has taught at the Princeton Art Association; Princeton Adult School; Montgomery Center for the Arts; and Artworks in Trenton.

She is a Founding Member of the Princeton Artists Alliance.

Johnson is represented in museum collections in USA, Japan, and Europe including The British Museum, London.

Galleries that represent her work include: The Williams Gallery, Princeton, NJ; The Verne Collection, Cleveland, OH; The Tolman Collection, Tokyo, Japan, and The Miyabi Gallery, Fukuoka, Japan.

Artist Statement:
Materials and processes inspire and guide my work. They provide the means for forming imagery and composition. They vitalize and characterize my visual expressions, whether with handmade paper, intaglio/relief printmaking, or other mediums.

Sometimes I go into my studio and just start manipulating materials. An idea may grow out of exploring different ways paper can speak. It is exciting to find new ways to visualize an idea, whether with foil, mesh, carborundum, or modeling paste - when making a plate, or with viscosities and colors of inks for printing from the plate.

An ongoing challenge for me in printmaking is finding ways the paper can be in active dialogue with the ink rather than merely a passive support for the ink.

Exploring and mining from the rich resources of intaglio and relief printmaking techniques is ever intriguing. The development of each work becomes a new adventure demanding its own assortment of known and, often, invented processes. The struggle is to find the combinations that work. The joy comes at the end of the trail when the work does seem to express something of what I am trying to say.