B+S With Friends

Episode 46: Carla Rae Johnson

Tamara White

Carla Rae Johnson’ is an artist that often addresses issues of social, political, and cultural importance through drawing, sculpture, conceptual, peformance, and installation art. You can find her at carlaraejohnson.org

Tamara White:

Hello and welcome to the BS with Friends podcast, a subsidiary of the Bader and Simon Gallery scheduled to open in Cincinnati, ohio, in early 2025. I'm your host, tamara White, founder and board president of Bader Simon. In this podcast, we will discuss art, social justice and well, basic BS with friends. Our approach is a bit lighter and irreverent and, as a warning for those with young ones nearby, there is a chance that colorful language might be used from time to time. Thank you for joining us and enjoy the episode. So today I'm recording from Los Angeles and I am in this very big echo chamber that does not have the best acoustics, so I apologize for this interview. In the middle of our interview there were smoke alarms and fire alarms going off that we had to stop and hopefully that gets edited out as well as we can manage it, but thank you for being here. Today.

Tamara White:

We have Carla Rae Johnson, and her artwork includes drawing, sculpture, conceptual performance and installation art. She is equally comfortable working solo, in collaboration or in art collectives. Her work is directly connected to ideas and often addresses issues of social, political and cultural importance. Carla Ray is affiliated with Ceres Gallery in New York City and she's a 2017 New York Stage Council for the Arts of New York Foundation for the Arts. She's a fellow in drawing. She's a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in sculpture and a 1990 recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. Her work has been exhibited in solo, invitational and curated shows and museums and galleries nationally and in New York City.

Tamara White:

She has a Master's of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa and, after 38 years as an art educator, carla Ra Ray retired from her position as a full-time professor of art at Westchester Community College in 2016. She is now delighted to devote her energies to art making full-time. So please enjoy this interview and thank you again for your patience in this recording. So, carla, thank you so much for being here, and I wanted to start by asking you about your artistic practice, which has spanned several decades and includes diverse media such as drawing, sculpture, performance. I'm curious how your approach to art making has evolved over the years and if anything has stayed consistent for you and in your work.

Carla Rae Johnson:

Okay, thank you. Great question and thank you for inviting me. I think a lot of things have stayed consistent in my work, but I think, in terms of evolution, there was one year that was formative and instrumental in my trajectory as a professional artist, and that was after the first year of college level teaching that I did. I was fortunate enough to get a teaching job right out of graduate school as a newly minted MFA and not everybody has been that lucky and it's getting harder and harder. If that's the career choice that you've made. I thought teaching was great because I would have summers as concentrated periods to make art, but I also decided during my first year of teaching that it didn't make sense for me as an artist to wait seven years for a sabbatical. So my plan was to take a sabbatical every other year and so after the first year of teaching I just I was able to live really cheap as a young person and I moved to Chicago because I grew up near Chicago and I love the city to do to have my own sabbatical. That wasn't such a wise choice in terms of the teaching market, but I did have that year and that year was absolutely crucial to me as an artist because I went twice a week to the Art Institute of Chicago probably my favorite museum and I joined as a member and I sat in the members' lounge drinking coffee which was free to members and reading the art magazines contemporary art magazines and learning about conceptual art and performance art and earthworks and feminist art. And they don't teach you that in art school. They bring you up to maybe 1950 if you're lucky, and then you have to learn the rest yourself, and so that was my immersive experience with that.

Carla Rae Johnson:

I also created artwork not as much as I thought I would in my one-year sabbatical, but every single work was a landmark piece. Every single work was a leap instead of just a step, and I knew where I was going. The work I decided would be conceptually based. Ideas were crucial, and I also decided that objects themselves were crucial to me as an artist. I wanted them to be mute objects, so you walk in a room and you confront this thing and hopefully it speaks to you in the way that we want art to speak to us. So that was a really important year.

Carla Rae Johnson:

The things that have stayed constant since then are that the work is always idea-based, whether it is performance or installation or sculpture or a drawing. The media and the format always grow from the concept. And then humor has been a constant in my work. As I gradually moved closer and closer to committing to my work being related to social justice, humor became more of a tool, because hard truths can be told if someone will laugh or chuckle. It opens the door for people to be more open to whatever you would like them to understand.

Carla Rae Johnson:

Another really important adage for me comes from probably my favorite favorite artist of all time, which is Marcel Duchamp. I was turned on to Duchamp in graduate school when my mentor professor saw me reading a book by Paul Klee. I thought I was doing good, but he came by and he was like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, put that away. You have to read Duchamp. And that was all she wrote. I've been a fan of Duchamp since then, but one of the things that Duchamp said that influenced me deeply was, he said, artists repeat themselves too much, and I kind of made a vow which makes me a bit of an iconoclast not really to repeat myself, not to go over one idea, not to be the one who does green paintings, but to have every work be a challenge both to me and whoever the viewer is.

Carla Rae Johnson:

And finally, I made a commitment early on to accessibility when I was in graduate school. If my mother couldn't understand it, it wasn't art for me, which did mean that we talked a lot and I gave her insights. But what I do with my artwork is provide a key, which is usually the title, and then, if necessary, a statement that especially works that I've done research for for over a year. I really want the viewer to know what's going on, and maybe that's partly the art educator in me. But it's like if a student comes into your class. It's like you're going to have to work really hard, but I'm here to make sure you're successful in understanding the material. So those are the things that have been consistent when you were in Chicago on the sabbatical.

Tamara White:

A lot of your work really emphasizes social, political, cultural themes. Did it start while you were in Chicago? Was that sort of the beginning of this focus of your work?

Carla Rae Johnson:

Actually not really. It's been a long journey, I don't know, jumps and starts, and maybe slow at first, but on a philosophical level it was certainly based on humanity, and someone recently told me in a blog interview that the common thread that she saw was compassion in the work. But I think it was more self-examination when I was in Chicago. But I did do a piece and there's a bit of a story with it that I think will help sort of illuminate where I go with my work, and it's a piece called Blind Ambition and it's something that scared the hell out of me when I did it, because I'm a shy person basically, and what I wanted to do was juxtapose a purely visual environment, which for me was the Art Institute of Chicago, with the idea of someone who is non-sighted. So I found out after I completed the piece that it was actually illegal to impersonate the blind as it was described at that point in time. I think people were soliciting funds or something, but it's a good thing. I didn't know that ahead of time. But I purchased a collapsible white cane and some mirror sunglasses and I practiced at the Art Institute figuring out what my right route would be, and I practiced closing my eyes and moving around my studio apartment in Chicago and on the day I was ready, what was really really interesting to me was that I learned that this kind of performance was really. Its success was based on what the artist learned, and the artist has no way of knowing what anybody else learned. I only hoped and imagined that people in the Art Institute who were looking at paintings and sculpture and beautiful work would be kind of thrown for a loop with someone coming.

Carla Rae Johnson:

It was before non-sighted people were welcome in a museum. Museums were not accessible to non-sighted people at that point in time. Now you'll see Braille labels and you will see some bronze sculptures that can be handled, but at that time it wasn't done and I wasn't protesting that. That wasn't the social justice thing. It was simply juxtaposing the non-sighted in a purely visual environment.

Carla Rae Johnson:

And the thing that I learned? I learned a whole lot, but the thing that was most important to me that I learned was I'm very nervous. I'm getting ready to enter the Art Institute. I'm putting on my glasses and unfolding my cane and I closed my eyes because the whole time I was in there for three hours, the whole time I was there I was non-sighted, so I was not, in some ways, a sham. And what I learned was, as soon as I closed my eyes, my nervousness went away, the visual world disappeared. I was, in essence to myself, invisible, so I couldn't see or even think about people looking at me. I simply moved through the museum and did what I did.

Carla Rae Johnson:

And the other sort of funny thing about the story the performance was that so many of the guards they're lovely guards there asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to see. So I was politely saying no, I'm just moving through. So I was politely saying no, I'm just moving through. At one point, a guard directed me to walk three steps forward and then turn to the right and he said you're standing in front of a Picasso. And I was like OK, so now what do I do? So I just stood there a respectful Picasso amount of time and then moved on. So it was just a deeply important learning experience at that point in time.

Tamara White:

So I'm really curious how you came to this idea of exploring non-sighted exploration within an art space.

Carla Rae Johnson:

I had a student at SUNY Plasberg where I was teaching, who was a very tactile young man. I was teaching ceramic sculpture at the time and he kept talking about non-visual art, non-visual art. He went on to be a painter so he committed to the visual. But that just little phrase was kind of important. I think what I was thinking about intellectually was the possibility that art is at heart non-visual, in the same sense that when you look at a work of art it's going through the portal of the eyes, just as music goes through the audio portal of the ears. But they all go to the same place and if it's really good art, it's somewhere in mind, heart, soul, somewhere there that it's touching something. And that's what I was thinking about at the time. So that in essence, even though everything in the Art Institute of Chicago was entering through the eyes, that it was really going somewhere that was non-visual. And subsequent to that piece I actually started exploring ways to be invisible.

Tamara White:

Oh, that's really interesting, and in doing this sort of work, as well as some of your other work that addresses more controversial or diverse topics, have you faced any challenges?

Carla Rae Johnson:

First I would say no, I've been lucky, but actually not so. I think two things. One, my use of humor has helped in many of the pieces with where I think I'm presenting what I think are hard truths, and also so Duchamp is my go-to for art, but my go-to person for I don't know life and metaphor and poetry is Emily Dickinson. I have loved her since high school. I wasn't introduced to her through her poems, because the poems you get in high school are really her least well-done poems. It was through her letters and how she framed her reality to people she was writing to, that I found Emily Dickinson.

Carla Rae Johnson:

But one of her most famous poems is I found Emily Dickinson, but one of her most famous poems is tell all the truth, tell all the truth, but tell it slant. And I do think that my telling, whatever my truths are, slant is one thing that has been very helpful. And if the, if viewers of people who look at my work can read through the slant, which for me I think it means metaphor, I think it's metaphors that are central Then they will get to the truth. But I think, having gone through that extra step, it's like it can't be didactic, it can't be direct. It isn't direct and people like get it and then can apply it if they choose to.

Tamara White:

So it sounds like you perhaps use humor as the way to navigate these situations. Are there any other tools that you find yourself using if you get pushback about topics?

Carla Rae Johnson:

self-using. If you get pushback about topics. I'll tell you that the only time there's only been one time that I got real pushback, it was an installation for a project, a citywide project. It was 1994. It was at the early stages of the Iraq War and I wanted to call attention to a lot about that war that I found horrifying, and so I proposed an installation to the project itself and it was accepted and what I proposed was there's a formal park in my city that has about 32 trees and what I wanted to do was spray paint the trees with a non-toxic children's temper.

Carla Rae Johnson:

Paint red, spray paint those trees red about a little over five feet up on the trunk of every tree, and then attach a red tag to each of those trees that would have a quote on it, quotes by Dr Martin Luther King Jr or Mahatma Gandhi or Eleanor Roosevelt just a range of quotable people and they were statements about the horrors of war. There were statements about the losses, the pointlessness, the absurdity, the innate insanity of war, and all was going well, except the weekend before I was to spray paint the trees, the New York Times put in a little blurb about an anti-war piece going up, and the very next day was our city council meeting, and the mayor and city council said we cannot have political art in our city, which, for me, all art is political. If it's not political, it's probably simply supporting the status quo, without intending to, maybe, but it does so, all art being political. I thought that was a really absurd statement, but I was flummoxed, I was gobsmacked, and what I did, after much sort of thinking, was the very next day I wrote a letter to local papers and the local papers picked it up with opinion pieces that said this is censorship and Peekskill I didn't mean to mention the town, I hope you edit that out.

Carla Rae Johnson:

Oh well, it's a whole different administration now. But they rescinded their order and so I was out spraying trees on Friday morning and it was a very I think. I think people flocked to it. It was a very interesting piece and it was a very I think I think people flock to it. It was a very interesting piece and the other takeaway for me as an artist is controversy gets you a lot of attention. It was probably the most publicized piece I've ever done.

Tamara White:

So this podcast will go live at a later date, but today, while we are speaking, is the day after he, who shall not be named, is entering office, and so, as we face this next presidency, do you anticipate that your work will shift in any way? And I'm also wondering what your thought is about threats of freedom within the art world freedom of speech that could potentially come as a result of having this person in office change it's going to.

Carla Rae Johnson:

This is huge. I think I suspect there will be, you know, a great sense of urgency in my studio and every art studio, and certainly in everything we do and say and think about everything happening outside of artist studios. I periodically grant myself permission to not make art when there are, I think, more important things to do. I read a quote when I was a teenager that comes up almost on a daily basis and that is, I mean, it's a privilege to make art right. And the quote is does the poet continue to write poetry when the house is burning, which is why you got up to check the smoke alarm? And it's a haunting. It's a haunting question, I think, for any creative person. I almost always come down on. This is what I've trained myself to do. It is the way that I'm most effective as a communicator and, yes, I am going to continue to make art, which I said immediately after to myself, immediately after the election.

Carla Rae Johnson:

I don't know what art, what form that art will take, but during the first Trump presidency, I started a series of drawings and I did. They were political cartoons, really, but they were drawings. I did one a week for the full time from November 9th 2016 until January 21st 2020, when our president our 46th president took office and I thought maybe I'd run out of material, funny material. There was no chance of running out of funny material, so I did one every week, but there were bonus weeks.

Carla Rae Johnson:

I had to do more than one drawing, sometimes three drawings in one week, and I used a Kewpie character the Kewpie doll character for the toddler that was in office and he was outrageous, but I made him funny and I think it was great therapy for me and I think it was great therapy for I posted it on my social media sites and then I ended up just publishing the work in actual books. It was five volumes because I ended up with 257 drawings at that time. So I'm confident that something will emerge. I'm done with QP and I'm done. It's just I can't, but I will do something and we all have to do something.

Tamara White:

You know I keep trying to tell myself it maybe it's not going to be as bad as I think it's going to be.

Tamara White:

But after yesterday I think, I've been trying to, I've been trying to convince myself of that, but I don't believe it anymore. I think it's going to be really bad and I have a 21 year old in college who's terrified and texting me and so I'm. I don't know what will happen about freedom of speech, because I will say, with Bader and Simon, our whole goal is to create exhibits that sort of provoke and challenge and create perspective and dialogue. But these MAGA people who he has just let out of prison frighten me and I don't know if that is if he has an administrative level or if his zealot crazy people will do it if there will be interesting to see what happens in an administrative level with freedom of speech. My daughter texted me that the Constitution has been removed from the White House website and so I don't know where we're headed. I'm curious what your thought is on if you think that freedom of speech for artists will be challenged.

Carla Rae Johnson:

Thank you, of course I think it will be. I think it will be in many ways, on many levels. I think what's important and I think we've heard and read this recently is never to self-censor. Don't give away anything until it's impossible for you to avoid it. But people will knuckle under, people in administrative and power positions will. But I'd like to think that most of the rats have already jumped on that ship and are going to sink it or not, but that I think those of us still out here who didn't attend the inauguration really are figuring out how to take our stands. And I won't be censored and I don't think you will be.

Carla Rae Johnson:

And I am really thrilled to hear about your gallery, to know about your gallery, because I think it's probably a rare thing. I don't know about the art world and, frankly, between you and me, I don't care about the art world. I think it's market driven and that's fine. They can do with whatever they want to do. My art is for people who can't afford it but would like to look at it and would like to maybe engage with it and learn something. So there's that.

Carla Rae Johnson:

So I don't I really care if the galleries, if the normal galleries, unlike yours, knuckle under and show pretty pictures. That doesn't bother me Well, it does, but as an artist, it doesn't affect anything that I do. So I think we're in for a really rough ride. I think it's going to be worse than bad. On a good day, I have hope, because I meet people like yourself. I meet other people who are committed to a just and compassionate world, and they're the people I want to hang with and they're the people that I want to listen to and be around. And I'm a little disconcerted by people who say getting through the next four years, because I don't know that it's just four years, but I don't, never mind, let's not go there, ok. So, yes, I'm very concerned about freedom of speech.

Tamara White:

Yeah, yes, I'm very concerned about freedom of speech. Yeah, and to your point, he may be gone in four years, but what policies are he you know what irreversible bullshit is he going to put into place that we have to deal with for the next many, many years? So, aside from that whole realm of situation, is there anything else coming up for you that you're working on, or do you feel like your energy is sort of focused in that direction right now?

Carla Rae Johnson:

Yes, there are things I'm working on. I have an idea for a drawing as large as I can make it. That really asks the question who are we? I think to all of us, because I think we were surprised that a third of the nation probably didn't vote and a third of the nation voted in a way that is shocking and horrifying.

Carla Rae Johnson:

But one of the things that I do in addition to making art is it's a service to the arts community. I live in an artist community. It's a service to the arts community. I live in an artist community and another artist and I work on a actually print on paper. I call it a newsletter, it's called the Artistic License and it just sits in a little newsstand in a local cafe and people who hang out there and come there pick it up. Our byline, our subheading, is satire, humor, information, information and truth. So that's S-H-I-T because we have a lot of fun with our publication. We have a poet in residence, a local poet. We have a photographer who always finds an image that fits the theme, and our themes have been about the election and the post-election and a huge issue on anxiety prior to November. But the other thing, and so that's having fun and it's also another means of community building.

Carla Rae Johnson:

I also do salons in Peekskill. I did them for 10 years, from 2010 to 2020. And it ended with COVID and started again in March of 2024. And you know, artists artists are solitary beings and we are isolated in our studios and we get inside our own heads. But we do need community, and especially now. So the salons are for that. We usually, as visual artists, we find community at exhibition openings, but I find that it's mostly idle chatter there. It's mostly chit-chat and how are you doing, what are you doing? Okay, thanks, wonderful, and it never goes very deep. And so the salons we go deep, kind of like I would assume Gertrude Stein's salons went, and so we meet, we have panels, I organize groups of and it isn't just visual artists, it's musicians and dancers and poets and writers and theater people, and we've had standing room only crowds, for it's a small space, so that's like 50 people, but for the whole year of 2024, and I expect that to continue. So that's an important thing that I do in addition to being in my studio.

Tamara White:

How often do you have those salons?

Carla Rae Johnson:

They're once a month or the first Tuesday of every month. Wow.

Tamara White:

That's a commitment. It is, but it's worth it. Yeah, yeah, and I suppose if you have that community, it makes it, it drives itself in some ways.

Carla Rae Johnson:

It does, especially when we can gather and talk deeply about things.

Tamara White:

Yeah, so I we asked the same five questions of all our guests at the end of our conversations, and so I'll jump into the first one, which is who would you like to find yourself stalled with in an elevator?

Carla Rae Johnson:

Well, when I think about your question, of course I go to. I've done a series called the Seance Series where I bring people back. But I've been bringing historical figures back since the early 90s and of all the historical figures, I research a lot about them, I learn a lot about them. But of all the ones that I have researched, fannie Lou Hamer is who I would want to spend time in an elevator with. In an elevator with because with a sixth grade education, she had national attention and she rose to the top of a movement that was all people with degrees from Yale and Harvard and elsewhere and she was eloquent and brilliant. But if you mean living, okay. So I'd love to spend time in the elevator with Lucy Lepard. I have a bazillion questions for her, but what I decided after much agony and searching Greta Thunberg, you know, a young person who's committed and passionate. That's who I'll be in the elevator with.

Tamara White:

Isn't she phenomenal? I just I loved. I mean, she does not mince words and she is not afraid of back and down, of speaking up and going against somebody.

Carla Rae Johnson:

Absolutely not. My father was full Swedish, so you know there's some of that little bit of that Swedish blood in me so I'm proud of her too.

Tamara White:

Yeah, that's a good answer. What art piece have you seen recently that had an impact on you?

Carla Rae Johnson:

Okay, so this is going to be pretty confessional. I live an hour from New York City. When I go in the city I don't go to the galleries anymore, I go to museums, you know the MoMA, the Whitney, the Met and others. I once made a New Year's resolution this was years ago that I would go to galleries until I saw something that moved me deeply, and I didn't last very long with the resolution. I wasn't seeing and maybe I'm a snob, I don't know, but I wasn't seeing things that moved me at that time and sometimes, I guess, museums. There has been a period of time that the public and the critics and whoever cares about art has looked and said, yes, so there's a better chance of finding something that moves you, but I haven't seen anything too recently, sorry.

Tamara White:

That's okay and hopefully that changes, as we were speaking to people responding to what's happening in the world and the next question is who most inspires you?

Carla Rae Johnson:

There are a lot of people, but if I had to put it in one sentence, it's people who speak truth to power, and so my art. As I look to historical figures, it's always someone I admire and I realized that we know that speaking truth to power is not easy and you have to. I think it's years of practice and thinking about it that are required before you're really any good at it. So I've always focused on people like Audre Lorde or Fannie Lou Hamer or Adrienne Rich, or there's a feminist lesbian theologian in the Episcopal Church, I believe, carter Hayward and these are people who have done it. And then, as a visual artist, I think Doris Salcido is one that I keep coming back to for the eloquence with which she is able to pull together things as an artist that truly speak to what has gone on in Columbia in the past and present, and when an artist can do that. They've certainly inspired me.

Tamara White:

Absolutely. What is something on your bucket list that would surprise people?

Carla Rae Johnson:

This is going to be a little like the art scene recently because, it might surprise people, I don't have a bucket list. I'm just not. That's not the way I operate. I'm not going to make a list of things that I want to do. Maybe there's too many things or maybe I don't know what's next. It'll appear in the bucket when I know what it is.

Tamara White:

Perfect answer. And then, if your life had a theme song that played every time you walked in a room, what would it be?

Carla Rae Johnson:

Now you come up with some of the hardest questions. You gave me these questions a week ago and I'm like, oh my God, because I don't think of theme songs. When I walk in a room I think somebody asks who left. But anyway, I thought about it a lot and I had to sort of do a little research and so I came up with a song by Dolly Parton, who's a really good lyricist, I mean, she really she's great, and she wrote a song and I have to ask to read the first verse.

Carla Rae Johnson:

Can I read the first verse? Thank you. It's called Woman Up and Take it Like a man. Is it easy? No, it ain't. Can I fix it? No, I can't, but I sure ain't gonna take it lying down. Will I make it, maybe? So Will I give up? Oh no, I'll be fighting till I'm six feet underground. I'm going to woman up and take it like a man. I'm going to buckle up, be tough enough to take control and make demands. Look like a woman, think like a man, be as good as or better than Got a woman up and take it like a man. That could not be a better place to stop and take it like a man.

Tamara White:

That could not be a better place to stop. I was thinking, as you were reading that, that maybe that needs to be our theme song for the next four years that we're not going to give up and we're just going to keep.

Carla Rae Johnson:

It certainly is of the moment and I think that it's highly appropriate for now. I think it's one of the reasons. When I found it, I was like, oh yeah.

Tamara White:

Yeah, so if people wanted to find you and see your work do you have Instagram or website? How would they find you?

Carla Rae Johnson:

I would send them to my website. I post my art on Instagram and I love Instagram. Well, I don't, but I like what I see on Instagram most of the time. But I post some dog pictures and cat pictures and they're really adorable. But I would send people to my website, which is Carla Rae Johnson at, or just com. It's Carla Rae.

Tamara White:

No, it's Carla Rae Johnsonorg Somebody stole mycom so it'sorg Okay perfect and we will put that in the description for the show so people have it as well. Thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time to be here and speaking with us and for your passion and, like you said, I think it's important that we all are going to form our own big circle and just keep doing what we can do. So, anyway, thanks again and thank you, have a great day. No-transcript. Until next time, have a fabulously artistic day.