Loni Johnson

Loni Johnson (b. Miami) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, educator, mother and activist who believes there is a cyclical obligation to give back and nurture our communities with her creative gift—and that it must be utilized to better our world.

Through movement and ritual, she creates healing spaces for Black women and explores how ancestral and historical memory informs how, when and where one enters and claims spaces.

In 2024, Johnson staged an intervention at Untitled Art, Miami Beach. BOOMBOOMBOOM!!, Johnson’s love letter to Miami, uplifted the communal practice of call-and-response, prompting a larger dialogue on visibility and Blackness. In another performance, titled 8:01, Johnson staged a processional to the ocean that explored the history of Miami Beach as a “sundown town” from the embodied experience of Black domestic workers. Through her body, Johnson called upon the past to intervene in the present and tell an often submerged story about Black women’s belonging in this city. Other exhibitions and performances include As We Move Forward at Augusta Savage Gallery, Amherst, Mass. (2024); Making Miami in the Miami Design District (2023); Biscayne at Kampong Gardens, Coconut Grove, Fla. (2023); and Asake: a conversation with self at Oolite Arts’ Windows at Walgreens, Miami Beach (2023).

Johnson is Lead Coordinator of Art Detectives, an arts education program rooted in the framework of social justice at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Prevention Coordinator of the youth arts prevention program at Concept Health Systems, and Chairperson of the National Visual Arts Selection Panel for YoungArts, the national foundation for the advancement of artists. She is also one of the founders of Miami Melanated Arts, a collective of Black artists who are creating space to reimagine what effective and impactful arts ecosystems in South Florida could be.

Commissioned Work

Filmed by Preguntas Studio