Join us on Instagram Live Saturday February 13 at 3:33 PM for a live closing activation by Loni Johnson of Made by Dusk by Mette Tommerup.

The performance is inspired by Oya –the powerful deity of the winds and tempests and Oshun- deity of fertility, love, and prosperity.  The performance is an offering to discuss how we occupy space when and where we enter and what traces we leave behind.

Loni Johnson is an artist, educator, mother and an activist that understands that as artists, there is a cyclical obligation to give back and nurture our communities, and believes that her creative gift must be utilized to better our world. Born and raised in Miami, she graduated from the New World School of the Arts in 1998 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from SUNY Purchase in 2003. She returned to her alma mater, New World School for the Arts as an adjunct professor from 2006 to 2012. In 2012, she became the prevention coordinator of The A-List Company, a youth arts peer education program funded through Florida’s Department of Children and Families. In 2011, Johnson exhibited at Art Africa during Miami Art Week and as part of Slavery to Self-Determination, an exhibit in honor of Black History Month at the University of Miami. She has been featured at the 5th Annual Spoken Soul Festival, in Miami Art Week’s PRIZM Art Fair in 2013 and 2014, and in the Nada Art Fair in 2017 in collaboration with Bas Fisher Invitational.

She has collaborated with site-specific dancer and choreographer Hattie Mae Williams as The OMM SISTAS, focusing on performance/installation pieces throughout Miami, and was a part of the creative team for Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Youth Artist Leadership Summer (YALS) Program, which was created to empower young women of color who have a passion for the arts. She also has worked as a teaching artist with the S.O.U.L Sister Leadership Collective providing mentorship and guidance to young femmes and TGNC youth of color through the use of the arts.

In 2017, Loni became a part of the Education Department at the Perez Art Museum Miami as a Teaching Artist and Lead Coordinator of The Art Detectives Program.  Art Detectives is an arts education program built on the framework of social justice.

Johnson has been a member of the National YoungArts Foundation since 2010, first as the Visual Arts Discipline Coordinator, and since 2016 as a member of the Visual Arts National Selection Panel.  In 2019, Loni was the recipient of The Knight Foundation’s Arts Champion Award.