About
About
My work begins in printmaking but pushes against its traditions of permanence, precision, and control. I use the language of craft (edition, matrix, archive) to examine the instability of the body and the systems that seek to regulate it. Through humor, desire, and material decay, I explore the intersections of consumption, sexuality, morality, and identity. Fatness, appetite, and discipline become recurring motifs, revealing the contradictions in how we moralize the body and its pleasures. By disrupting printmaking’s expectation of endurance and embracing degradation, I reimagine the medium as a living, fallible body, one that resists containment and insists on transformation.
Mia Johnson is an interdisciplinary artist and historian from Columbus, Ohio. She earned a BFA in Print Media & Photography and a BA in Art History from Kent State University, followed by an MFA in Printmaking from Ohio University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has completed residencies at Zygote Press and Columbus Printed Arts Center.
Johnson currently lives in Kansas City. She serves as Director of the Morris Gallery and Assistant Professor of Art at Missouri Valley College in Marshall, Missouri. In addition, she is a member of the curatorial team at The Waiting Room, a nonprofit artist-run space located in Kansas City's Historic West Bottoms district.