Merritt Johnson was born in West Baltimore spending her childhood navigating between trees, tarps and concrete. She earned her BFA at Carnegie Mellon, MFA at MassArt.
Her work navigates between bodies and the body politic, land and culture: making reflectors, and vision shifters looking through puddles of blood and oil, plastic tarps, chainlink fences, cloud cover, tree lines, clear cuts, shell, bone, skin and hair.
She has seen and felt tongues and knives cut intersections of land, culture, sex, and body; in response she weaves together seen and unseen to build connection and vision.
Johnson exposes not-seeing or listening as a route to fear. She casts, weaves, draws, beads, paints, carves, performs, films, and projects into and out of how we are, to tell stories, asking how we could be.
She has taught across disciplines at ECUAD since 2007.
