Jump to content

Ynez Johnston

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Debk20 (talk | contribs) at 18:23, 30 November 2023 (added significant life details. In progress edit). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Ynez Johnston
Ynez Johnston
Born
Ynez Johnston

(1920-05-12)May 12, 1920
Berkeley, California, U.S.
DiedMarch 13, 2019(2019-03-13) (aged 98)
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
Years active1943–1991
Known forPainting
SpouseJohn Berry

Ynez Johnston (May 12, 1920 – March 13, 2019)[1] was an American painter, sculptor, printmaker and educator.[2] Her artwork is modernist and abstract with a narrative of imaginative lands or creatures, and often featuring collage.[3] Johnston was based in Los Angeles.[4][5]

Early Life

Johnston was born on May 12, 1920, in Berkeley, California. She attended University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with artists John Haley, Ward Lockwood, Earle Loran, and Margaret Peterson, as well as with Worth Ryder, who taught art history. She earned her bachelor of fine arts in 1941.

Johnston received Berkeley’s Bertha Taussig Memorial Award in 1941, which enabled her to travel to Mexico, where she lived and worked until 1943. She would continue to travel around the world over the course of her life, including to Nepal, Spain, India, Cambodia, and Italy, and her subsequent works reflect a myriad of international artistic traditions. Johnston’s first solo exhibition was held at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in 1943, and she earned her masters of fine arts from Berkeley in 1947.

Career

Artistic Practice

Johnston exhibited with different Los Angeles galleries between 1947 and 1949, and she moved to Los Angeles in 1949. In 1950, Johnston was included in a juried exhibition, curated by Andrew C. Ritchie, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where her etching won a prize (nordland 31). She was invited by Ritchie as one of three artists to be included in a 1950-1951 New Talent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first of many presentations of her work on the East Coast.[6] In 1952, Johnston’s work was exhibited as the first solo exhibition at the new Paul Kantor Gallery, founded by Paul and Jo Kantor, where she would continue to show consistently until the mid 1960s (nordland 42; 58). Johnston produced prints through Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1965.

Of her 1955 exhibition at the Legion of Honor, critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote: “Ynez Johnston [is] an artist who has mastered a fabulous, very personal, very important, and all but indescribable style. Miss Johnston fuses dream and improvisation...in the infinite, unbelievably minute elaboration of her design, which often takes on an almost microscopic character. Her scale can be very deceptive, however; once it entraps the eye it leads it through extraordinary shifts and reversals, so that the microscopic is revealed as immense vanishes into the small...” (nordland 47).

Johnson continued to exhibit her work nationally and internationally over the course of her life, including in Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Japan (nordland 113). Retrospectives of Johnston’s work were held at Weiner Gallery in New York in 1977 and at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 1978. Johnston also received a commission from the Graphic Arts Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1981, and she was an artist in residence at Fullerton College in 1982.

Teaching Career

Johnston started teaching art classes at various universities and colleges in 1950 and ended teaching in 1980.[7] She began at University of California, Berkeley (1950–1951) and then continued her teaching career at Colorado Springs Fine Art Center (1954–1955), Chouinard Art Institute (1956), California State College (1966–1967, 1969, 1973), the University of Jerusalem (1967), and Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design (1978–1980).[7]

Personal Life

Her work is featured in various permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),[2] the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[8] the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[9] the Art Institute of Chicago,[10] the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),[11] the Spencer Museum of Art,[12] the National Gallery of Art,[13] Fullerton College,[14] the McNay Art Museum,[15] the University of Michigan Museum of Art,[16] the Indianapolis Museum of Art,[17] and others. She died in 2019.[18]

The estate of Ynez Johnston is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts.[19]

Awards

Johnston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 for fine art, which allowed her travel to Italy.[7][20] In 1955–1956 she was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant for painting and printmaking.[7] Johnston was awarded the National Endowment for the Art (NEA) grant in 1976 and 1986.[7]

  • Works by Ynez Johnston
  • Untitled (plate)
    Untitled (plate)
  • "Ship and Storm" (1949), etching
    "Ship and Storm" (1949), etching

References

  1. ^ "Sonoma Valley Museum of Art unveils 2 new shows". Sonoma Index-Tribune. 2021-06-10. Retrieved 2021-07-07.
  2. ^ a b "Artists, Ynez Johnston". Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Retrieved 2017-03-09.
  3. ^ Pagel, David (1994-04-28). "Art Reviews : Ynez Johnston's Mythical Flights of Fancy". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved 2017-12-30.
  4. ^ Wyszpolski, Bondo (August 30, 2017). "Astrid Francis at "Resin" in Hermosa Beach". Easy Reader News. Retrieved 2017-12-30.
  5. ^ Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980. Berlin: Getty Publications. 2011. pp. 28–31. ISBN 978-1606060728.
  6. ^ https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2016/spelunker/exhibitions/3873/. {{cite web}}: External link in |website= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help); Missing or empty |url= (help)
  7. ^ a b c d e Heller, Jules; Heller, Nancy G. (2013). North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary. Routledge. ISBN 978-1135638894.
  8. ^ "Ynez Johnson, Collection". The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met Museum). Retrieved 2017-12-30.
  9. ^ "Ynez Johnston Collection". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 2017-12-30.
  10. ^ "Johnston, Ynez". The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved 2017-12-30.
  11. ^ "Ynez Johnston, LACMA Collections". Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Retrieved 2017-12-30.
  12. ^ "Collection, Ynez Johnston". Spencer Museum of Art. Retrieved 2017-12-30.
  13. ^ "Artist Info". National Gallery of Art. Retrieved 2017-12-30.
  14. ^ "Voyage of the Mandarins by Ynez Johnston, Permanent Collection". Fullerton College Art Department. Retrieved 2017-12-30.
  15. ^ "Desert of the Lions". McNay Art Museum. Retrieved 2021-07-02.
  16. ^ "Exchange: Ancient Temple". exchange.umma.umich.edu. Retrieved 2021-07-02.
  17. ^ "The Other World". Indianapolis Museum of Art Online Collection. Retrieved 2021-07-02.
  18. ^ "Ynez Johnston (1920-2019) - Artist Biography". Lewallen Galleries. Retrieved 2021-11-23.
  19. ^ https://www.ynezjohnston.com
  20. ^ "Ynez Johnston Fellow: Awarded 1952 Field of Study: Fine Arts Competition: US & Canada". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 2017-12-27.

Media related to Ynez Johnston at Wikimedia Commons

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ynez_Johnston&oldid=1187669151"