Heather Lynn Johnson - Artist & Poet
Heather Lynn Johnson is an artist and poet living in Brooklyn. Her work is characterized by its lyricism and cultural critique. Johnson’s formal approach to the narrative, whether visual or poetic, is distinguished by her willingness to lay bare her own existence.
Johnson uses archived ephemera and library collections as a visual language, material, and origin point to excavate a truth. Centered around Black American trauma, disregard, and pain, with an emphasis on objectification and lost histories, she uses an autobiographical framework and considers her work self-portraits, imbued by her lived experience as a butch black lesbian. The 2017 literary fellow for Queer|Art|Mentorship, Johnson is the author of “The Survival Guide For Queer Black Youth” (Inpatient Press, 2017). Presently, she is painting self-studies for her “After Basquiat” series and working on her next book of poetry “I Owe You Nothing: How to be Black and Free”.
Johnson received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has lectured at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Pratt University. Her work is in the collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art and she has received an International Photography Lucie Award. Johnson's art has been exhibited internationally and most notably at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Johnson is currently a co-curator for Queer|Art|Film.
Contact Me
hrockjohnson at gmail dot com