The Art of Democracy

The Art of Democracy demonstrates the integral role that artists play in a healthy democracy. The exhibition looks to explore ways that artists and activists are using their voices, working in direct collaboration with communities, and harnessing collective power to move us towards a more just and liberated world.

Curated by Natalie Sweet at Brew House Arts

711 S. 21st Street #210, Pittsburgh, PA 15203

October 10 through November 2, 2024

Opening: Thursday, October 10 from 6:30–8:30pm

The exhibition series is the result of a partnership between Keystone Progress Education Fund and Casey Droege Cultural Productions.

Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism

Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism includes a chapter I co-authored with Susanne Slavick on my DRAIN series.

Edited by Grant Hamming and Natalie Philips. Published by Routledge (2024).

Drain presents a collection of annotated drawings that camouflage Trump’s calumny with the glitz of his notorious ersatz aesthetic. The luxurious trappings of the former president’s personal and business properties are depicted as protecting and comforting creatures of the swamp, exposing the emptiness of his campaign promise “to drain the swamp in Washington” with ethics reforms “to make our government honest once again." The devil is in the details of the decor, and the corruption that perpetuates it, ensuring the persistence of vice and venality. Some of the swamp creatures appear as inflatable toys, to be tolerated, even enjoyed and played with. Like his charge to drain the swamp, they were never meant to be taken seriously.

ASSESSMENT

Rosefsky Gallery at Binghamton University

January 25 - February 22, 2024

ASSESSMENT (or antidotal portraits for historical abuse) offers an allegorical accounting of the acquisition and inheritance, plunder and punishment that characterizes American history. Its scenes are charged, and charge more. Episodic entries of violent possession, pervasive oppression, and persistent discrimination fill a visual ledger of an inequitable economy. Depictions both earnest and ironic alternate to create a double accounting. The tally keeps changing with narratives of uneasy purchase. There is no sum total; the balance may never be reconciled.

Image: Detail from DIrigible, 2024, Ink, gouache and conte crayon on paper, 50 x 116 inches

WHAT IS FOR SUPPER? WHAT IS A MEAL?

Northern Illinois University Art Museum,  Dekalb IL

November. 14 to December. 16, 2023 and January. 16 to February. 17, 2024 (closed for winter break)

"What is for Supper? What is a Meal?" explores aspects of nurturing, socialization, health and sustainability. Geographic, cultural and economic differences may determine what is available to eat and what would be satisfying as a meal. The importance of food shared is a linchpin of hospitality and is an integral component for social dialogue to take place. Issues that threaten our food intake also threaten our greater well-being. This exhibition is curated by the NIU Art Museum Exhibition Advisory Committee.

The artists participating in this exhibition were selected from private and public collections, a national call for entry and by invitation and include: Rein Brooks, Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, Sue Coe, Honoré Daumier, Evelyn Davis-Walker, Andrew DeCaen, J. J. Grandville, Daniel Grych, Henry Hargreaves, Tom Huck, Andrew Ellis Johnson, Christina Kang, Marina Kuchinski, Caitlyn Lawler, Laura Letinsky, Maureen O'Leary, Janelle O'Malley, JWP, Lisa Riedl, Dana Sherwood, Susanne Slavick, Neal Slavin, So Young Song, Sophia Varcados and Andy Warhol.

For more information on SHARE, my work in the exhibition.

Andrew Ellis Johnson: Share, 2010, cast black marble, mud pie, 12 x 16 x 2 inches

PICTURING THE CONSTITUTION

Picturing the Constitution, curated by Katherine Gressel at The Old Stone House

336 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY (between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, Park Slope)

October 20, 2023 - January 7, 2024

________________

There has always been a gap in the Constitution—between its ideals and the realities by which this country has been governed. At times, the gaps are horrific chasms; sometimes they begin to close, promising rights more equally distributed.

 My allegorical visual narratives explore the profound consequences of a constitution written by white men, the majority of whom were owners of enslaved people.  They address ways that the ideals of the Constitution have been selectively applied or ignored, leaving many outside its stated principles and protections, particularly concerning voting rights, reproductive freedom, and the right to asylum.

Sinkhole presents a ballot worker diligently performing duties in a sinkhole of suspicion and harassment, surrounded by long lines in districts purposely assigned fewer polling stations, shorter voting calendars, and increasing restrictions. Above her are ghostly gerrymandering politicians who skew the democratic process, promoting disenfranchisement and undermining the spirit of our founding documents. They represent an unbroken lineage of efforts to thwart voting protections guaranteed by constitutional amendments.

Image: Sinkhole, 2023, Ink and gouache on Yupo paper, 37.5 x 24.5 inches

CANNIBALS OF LOVE

Ejecta Projects, Carlisle PA

April 1 - May 20, 2023

Review: Get an appetite for love at Ejecta Projects, The Sentinel, April 19, 2023

Queen on Her Own Color (detail), 2021, Ink on paper, 49.5 x 55 inches

Contextualizing texts from the Monticello site (https://www.monticello.org/) follow in italics, followed by my text.

Unlike countless enslaved women, Sally Hemings was able to negotiate with her owner. In Paris, where she was free, the 16-year-old agreed to return to enslavement at Monticello in exchange for “extraordinary privileges” for herself and freedom for her unborn children. Over the next 32 years Hemings raised four children—Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston—and prepared them for their eventual emancipation. She did not negotiate for, or ever receive, legal freedom in Virginia.

…

[Sally Hemings’ son], Madison Hemings recounted that his mother “became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine” in France. When Jefferson prepared to return to America, Hemings said his mother refused to come back, and only did so upon negotiating “extraordinary privileges” for herself and freedom for her future children. He also noted that she was pregnant when she arrived in Virginia, and that the child “lived but a short time.” No other record of that child has been found.

The Monticello site offers no proving account of Hemings’ negotiation for her personal freedom, or her reason for trusting Jefferson to keep his promise. Pregnant at the age of 16, we wonder what kind of choice she really had. She returned from Paris, where she was free, to Virginia as an enslaved household servant and lady’s maid. She bore at least six children fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Decades after the Paris negotiation, her four surviving children were freed—two daughters in the early 1820’s and her two sons only after Jefferson died in 1826. Never legally emancipated, Sally Heming was unofficially freed—or “given her time”—by Jefferson’s daughter Martha after his death.

In the game of chess, “The King and Queen, as the most significant pieces, stand in the middle of the chessboard.  Chess rules dictate “queen on color,” meaning the White Queen goes on a light square and the Black Queen on a dark square, supposedly because the King is a gentleman and invites the Queen to stand on her own color.

These rules suggest a patronizing chivalry toward both an official and intimate partner. In the drawing, Sally Hemings and Jefferson sit on a checked cloth. Their ‘leisure,’ with or without consent, is staged against a backdrop of enslaved field laborers.  Jefferson makes advances on her while holding a white queen. Hemings’ black pieces are toppled but her hoe and trowel both have blades— aspirational tools for a cannibalized ‘love.’

BALLOTS NOT BULLETS

WhiteBox, curated by Raul Zamudio and Juan Puntes, New York NY

October 31 – November 20, 2022

With live performances on November 8 from 6 pm to 12 am, on the day of the 2022 Midterm Elections. Ballots Not Bullets is an international, mixed-media art exhibition that takes its cue from an eponymous quote by Abraham Lincoln during the Reconstruction period after his historic Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery. His clarion call entailed pleading with all American citizens to vote and exercise democracy rather than resort to violence that had almost ended the burgeoning American experiment during the Civil War. Fast forward to the present-day, violent partisanship is not only more prevalent than ever, but democracy itself is under attack by those who believe that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate because it was “stolen” from them.  

Doubt in government and its institutions intentionally cultivated by both domestic and foreign ideologues is not just exploiting the ubiquitous cynicism towards politicians but erodes the greater rule of law; for the incremental dismantling of democracy’s infrastructure, albeit already precarious, can lead to the slow introduction of authoritarianism in the form of those who see democracy as an impediment to their general will-to-power. Rising authoritarianism in the USA is no mere left-wing Internet conspiracy, as it has reared its ugly head in many facets of social life that we have taken for granted: among other things, the revoking of Roe vs Wade, gerrymandering, questioning of the Respect for Marriage Act that legally recognizes same-sex married couples, and to come full circle with Lincoln’s quote cited above, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 too has come under attack. Ballots Not Bullets, then, will address these concerns in an art exhibition that comes right at the moment when the USA will either uphold democracy or slowly succumb to authoritarianism, and either of these two possibilities is contingent on the 2022 Midterm Elections. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, ballots not bullets are more important than ever.

Andrew Ellis Johnson, STREWN 2015, HD Video, 5:02 minutes

VESTED: INTEREST DUE

March 11-April 15, 2022

Davis Gallery at Hobart and Wiliam Smith Colleges in Geneva NY

Vested: Interest Due offers an allegorical accounting of the acquisition and inheritance, plunder and punishment that characterizes American history. Its scenes are charged, and charge more. Episodic entries of violent possession, pervasive oppression, and persistent discrimination fill a visual ledger of an inequitable economy. Depictions both earnest and ironic alternate to create a double accounting. The tally keeps changing with narratives of uneasy purchase. There is no sum total; the balance may never be reconciled.

Five of our first seven presidents enslaved hundreds of people, institutionalizing free labor that generated personal profit and fed our unfathomable national prosperity. The constitutional heritage that our founding fathers forged is indeed foundational to today’s injustices.  The system that served their interests still promotes political disenfranchisement, racism, property rights over human rights, and hypocritical rhetoric espousing democratic values. Willingly or unwillingly, we are all invested in this legacy. 

The figures in Vested: Interest Due are drawn in dire conditions, suffering dilemmas of their own making or overcoming circumstances of their servitude. They occupy tableaux of reaping and yielding, exacting and extracting, whether in domestic or work spaces, distant fields and hospitals, or factories and classrooms. Subjects meant to yield, and whose yields only enrich others, become reapers of retribution and restitution. Those who insure their own privilege, through exclusive legal rights, become, in turn, subject to unflinching scrutiny.

Vested: Interest Due is an assessment. Calculated reform would leave us short. A reckoning is due.

A Body of Principles, 2021, Ink, gouache and distemper on paper, 57 x 114 inches

The fifth president James Monroe is decapitated—along with the mind that developed his eponymous doctrine.  A doctrine is a body of principles. But the body of principals, people whose land, labor and lives were exploited, is primary.  Their expropriated lands grow wheat for domestic and international trade, supplanting tobacco.  Timing is everything in this field of reaping and harvesting. 

Democratic values espoused for a minority were justifications to retain oligarchic privilege.  By design, the ‘new world’ imported European aspirations for, and the inequities of, empire, along with furniture and jewelry.  Elizabeth Monroe’s finery and her husband’s Bellangé furniture cascade and crumble, tassels quake, and the glaringly obvious is uncovered.  Sheaves are still borne.

ARROGATE

Arrogate: Andrew Ellis Johnson at University of Dayton Index Gallery at the Dayton Arcade, OH.

March 24 – May 20, 2022

“We are indoctrinated to not see our own privilege. This willful and self-serving blindness is difficult to sustain, not a trait to be pitied or suffered. Yet privilege continues to excuse itself. 

ARROGATE is a verb meaning to ‘assume or appropriate to oneself without right.’ The large drawings in ARROGATE portray five of our first seven presidents who were masters of this verb—as they were masters of hundreds of enslaved people. They were masters of an institution that amassed wealth for themselves and our nation, through claiming rights without right.

In ARROGATE, images of indictment, comeuppance, reflection and revenge  allude to rights violated, abrogated, lost and won—struggles that persist today.”

ASUNDER

Proyectos Raul Ramudio presentá:

ASUNDER: Andrew Ellis Johnson and Susanne Slavick

The Empty Circle 499 Third Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215

ASUNDER speaks to being torn apart or in pieces—whether through war, revolution, ideological impasse, or willful ignorance. Division abounds, between truth and lies, justice and inequity.

This show features creatures both earthbound and airborne. Swept up in the tumult, they embody the aspirations and failures that both separate and unite us. Pigs—an intelligent species—swell with corporate greed or wallow among strewn books. Collective knowledge is reduced to and consumed as pulp. Facts are denied, truths twisted and trampled. Birds promise to rise above it all but remain grounded. They strut past devastation or perch on rubble, going about business as usual or surveying a world in pieces—waiting to be put back together again.

THE CROSSING PREMIERES IN MARSEILLE

THE CROSSING premieres as a video installation through Avis de Passage, 34E Festival Les Instants Vidéo at Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, France, November 10, 2021 – February 13, 2022

The festival is described as enlivened by a trio of passion:
mad love (to desire, to burn, to experiment)
poetry (to do, to expose, to dare)
revolution (to imagine, to transform, to get free, to put aside our fears)

THE CROSSING is dedicated to all those no longer at liberty to struggle

THE CROSSING stares at the instability of freedom, the fragility of democracy, the precarity of revolutionary spirit and the vulnerability of memory.

THE CROSSING is transfixed by what cannot be held.  It stares as shadow and substance flutter, as democracy and revolution waver, as freedom fades and blackened lamps inhale spirits for a spell.  

Night and morning seep.  The confines of memory do not hold.

THE CROSSING is witness to what cannot be borne.  It gazes at sentinels on street lights, as power arcs and dies, to where saddles straddle traffic lights and wired speakers hang. Twisted strings numb the air with the decay of a minor chord.  Fumes of desperation still ignite.

THE CROSSING 2021, HD Video, 11:47