About Tonika Johnson
Tonika Johnson was born in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. However, Johnson attended high school across the city at Lane Wood College Prep. It was during Johnson's daily bus rides to high school that she began noticing the segregation that exists between the different sides of Chicago. Years later, after earning a degree in Journalism and Photography and her MBA, Johnson used her art to bring awareness and humanity to her hometown. Her most notable exhibit, Folded Map, depicts the disparity in corresponding houses on Chicago's north and south sides. Tonika was named Chicagoan of the Year in 2017 for her art and advocacy.
Tonika Johnson's Creative Process
Like many creatives, Tonika draws inspiration from others in her field. Tonika first fell in love with photography after seeing the works of Gordon Parks who she says depicted black people as she saw them: dignified and resilient. In seeing his work, Tonika realized that photography was a medium through which she too could bring long-lasting awareness to social injustices. One of Tonika's first big projects, entitled Everyday Englewood, focused on changing the narrative about neighborhoods and residents on the South Side. Following this, Tonika drew on the observations she had made so many years ago and decided to use her art to educate people on the segregation in Chicago. In Smith and Ward's article "Cognition and the Creation of Ideas", they describe that humans are constantly collecting information from their surrounding world. They go on to say that "the conceptual structures people generate in service of organizing and understanding these experiences can be thought of as instances of creativity". Tonika's Folded Map exhibit, which started from an observation she made years earlier, exemplifies how collecting and grappling with information can play a key role in creativity. |
| Photos from Folded Map depicting houses at the same address on Chicago's North and South Sides. |
More about the Folded Map project:
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I am so glad that you wrote about Tonika Johnson! I work at the museum her exhibit has been featured at for the last few months and have watched her "map twins" interviews video at least thirty times and heard docents talking about her journey at least a couple of times a week. She is a fascinating creative and I love her work. Something that I found really interesting and that you brought up about her process, is that she really started thinking about the idea in high school, on the way, in fact, to the high school her own children now attend. The idea took years to incubate in her mind as she gained new skills and new perspectives as she grew up and became the woman she is today, as she got involved in projects like R.A.G.E. (Resident Association of Greater Englewood), to improve her neighborhood, and as she grew as an artist.
ReplyDeleteI think it is really beautiful when people bring their education and training back to improve their hometowns. It's really cool that this is so close to our neighborhood too. Even coming from the north side, the segregation and inequality throughout the city is apparent, but easily avoidable when you are on the more affluent side. Her project and focus on segregation is particularly interesting with the rise in gentrification. It calls on us as residents of this area as well as those in power in Chicago to make note of the humanity between the people on both sides regardless of which side of the loop it resides and their economic situation. I like that this goes beyond an art piece and she includes action along with her message of equality. The receptive response of the people shows how obvious the city's segregation is to people in Chicago. Love that this creative had a social justice perspective!! I also love how this project had a direct human interaction from her creative process to her implementation of the project.
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