Martin Johnson
American, Born 1951
Martin Johnson was born in New Jersey and raised from the age of five in Richmond, Virginia. Graduating from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University with a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1974, he went on to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and obtained an MFA in Studio Art. At school “Johnson wove words and patterns together in a manner that expresses a genuine kinship with outsider artists,” states a retrospective 2011 article in the Folk Art Messenger. In 1977 he graduated and moved to New York City. There he took up a studio space at PS1 where he met the Vogels. By 1979 he was being represented by the Phyllis Kind Gallery. He held seven solo shows at Phyllis Kind over the next decade. In 1988 he moved back to Virginia to take over the family business, a marketer and supplier of plumbing products. His artistic activity became gradually less public; between 1995 and 2011 he had no exhibitions, though his personal gallery ForInstance fills two floors of a house in Richmond, and his artworks overflow into storage rooms. His pieces -- he works both in sculpture and in two-dimensional paintings or collages -- often look agglomerated -- objects or marks are fixed together among series of totemic points, a smiling mouth, or a single word, often the word “For,” which came to him “impulsively” in 1974. “For seemed to mean For Us,” he told the Folk Art Messenger. “Then I saw the words For is Force For Us. The word For, when broken down, is a symbol for composition: Feel-Frame, Order and Rhythm. When they join together, I make my art.”