Greenport artist Poppy Johnson has always been a rebel. She grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, where her parents where chemists who liked raucous parties.
As a teenager, she wanted to go to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), but her parents made her to to Barnard College instead. She quit after a few months and ran off to Paris, where she studied etching at Atelier 17 before running out of money and returning home. She got into RISD and ended up hating it. It was 1968 and she packed up everything and moved back to New York City, where she quickly became immersed in the guerrilla art scene of the day.
Pictured Above: Poppy Johnson with her piece “Three Word Song: I Love You.”
“There was a lot of stuff going on in New York City in 1968, ’69. We were trying to take over the world and stop the war and stop racism, misogyny, museums cooperating with war criminals,” Ms. Johnson told The Beacon in an interview this week. “You know, a lot of us younger people had an agenda.”
Ms. Johnson’s former husband, also an artist, moved her and her young children into a burned out laundry building on Carpenter Street in Greenport in early 1980s as they were about to be evicted from their Tribeca loft.
She ended up working for Greenport’s Floyd Memorial Library for 40 years, where her work is the subject of a new show, “Poppy Johnson Introspective,” opening this Friday, Sept. 18.
Retired from the library since 2021, she says, she has finally built a small studio of her own two years ago and “no longer has any excuse not to make a lot of art every day.”
“This exhibit is not a retrospective. “This exhibit is an introspective,” she said in her announcement of the exhibit, which showcases a range of sculptures, assemblages, drawings, paintings, photographs and collages that reflect particular moments in time. “A retrospective would include references to, documentation of or reenactments of the performances, installations, collaborations and other mostly lost ephemeral activities which were the early emphasis of my career.”
“Also lost are many early paintings and drawings because of moves, divorces, a flood, a chronic lack of designated studio space to call my own, and a certain reluctance to assign value to material objects. But I did and do make material objects,” she added. “Looking at works made when I was in my early 20s beside works made recently is a way of thinking about what is interesting, what is beautiful, what changes, what persists.”
She leans into nostalgia only when pressed — materials she loves, she said, include oil paints and the linseed oil and turpentine used to clean them up — ‘all toxic stuff’ — and the acid from the etchings she did in Paris.
“I was busy figuring out ‘how do you live in Paris if you have no money?'” she said of her time there. “Most of the other people there had trust funds, or they were older, established as painters but they wanted to learn how to make etchings.”
There are several recurring themes throughout the works in the exhibition, which explores Ms. Johnson’s playful use of words and musical instruments, with boxes that are repositories of objects that seem to have been endowed with magical qualities.
“The idea of the artist as a magician, as a preserver of the past and a pauser of time is prevalent,” according to an overview of the show prepared by curator Sally Grant, whom Ms. Johnson said “cleverly organized the work into categories.”
“It’s been a pleasure to work with Poppy on this exhibition,” Ms. Grant told us this week. “When Poppy worked at Floyd Memorial Library, she used to curate the art exhibitions, and when she retired, I took on the role of curator, so this solo show feels very significant. I greatly admire Poppy’s extensive involvement in art activism and the feminist movement over the years, and to be involved in displaying these more personal, quiet, introspective works is a privilege. Many people know and love Poppy through her career as a librarian at Floyd Memorial Library, so it seems especially meaningful to show these artworks – many of which convey the potent possibilities of words — here.
Ms. Johnson recalls her activism, with groups including the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerilla Art Action Group, fondly.
“We used to have all these meetings, and we were particularly involved in trying to change the way museums and galleries treated artists,” she said. “We wanted all these places to get rid of Rockefeller’s money. We had all sorts of demands about what the art establishment should be doing to stop all the bad things that were going on. And of course, we had internecine warfare between all the different groups.”
“The Museum of Modern Art, at this time, had Picasso’s painting Guernica, and I found a friend who was an Episcopal priest, and a woman who had a one-year-old baby — an artist who was also a young mother. We organized a whole bunch of other people, and we all went to the museum, and we sat down in front of Guernica, and the priest read some kinds of poems all about peace and we just filled the whole room with people sitting down, and asking for peace.”
“And of course, it got the museum all in a tither,” she said. “Oh, my gosh — how do we throw out mothers and babies and priests?”
She recalled another rally that was supposed to be in Central Park, but the crowd instead decided to march downtown to City Hall, but were almost run down by mounted policemen.
During this time, she started what she called the Perigee Parallax Press, “where I made postcards, using rubber stamps and stickers and all kinds of things, and I just sent them to people.”
“A lot of my life, I never had a studio. Sometimes I thought I was gonna have a studio. I worked on various buildings that I co-owned, thinking that I would get studio space, but somehow, it didn’t happen,” she said. “I would just sit at the kitchen table, and sometimes I used nail polish instead of paint, and sometimes I just glued things together. I never had money for materials.”
But as necessity is the mother of all sorts of things, Ms. Johnson became an inventor — an alchemist of sorts.
At one point, she briefly lived in Gardiner, New York, “where there was a woods behind the house. And the woods seemed like as good a place as any to make art. I would clump out there in my rubber boots, and I made a whole bunch of things. I used rocks, mirrors, and string, and, things that I found in the woods.”
During this time she was gifted a small drawing of a magician putting a spell on something that looked like it was partly a pile of rocks and partly an animal.
“I’ve never understood whether this artist, this magician, this wizard, is turning a pile of rocks into an animal, or turning the animal into a pile of rocks,” she said.
That drawing ended up being the impetus for a series of creatures that were part rock and part animal.
“It’s about transformation,” she said, holding her one remaining rock animal.
“That’s all that’s left, because the rest was very ephemeral,” she added. “At that time, we didn’t have iPhones and such things. I took one tiny little role of black and white pictures that were very bad. Mainly, this stuff has just disappeared. But I still have the rock animal.”
Ms. Johnson first saw Greenport when “this anonymous husband person had bought this burnt out laundry building on Carpenter Street without me having seen it because I had just given birth,” she said. “Meanwhile, we’re getting evicted from our loft in Tribeca because we can’t possibly pay the rent because it goes up by something like a million dollars every week. He borrowed some money from his father and bought the burnt out laundry building.”
“I got on a train with two six-year-old twins, a tiny baby and strollers and bags, and I heard the conductor saying ‘Wee Waa Wee Waa.’ I thought he was saying Greenport, but when I got out with the babies and bags and everything, we were in Freeport.”
She finally got to Greenport and found out the burnt out laundry building was actually incredible.
“It turned out great. We worked very hard on it,” she said. “I had some vague ideas about how to put up Sheetrock and paint. [Artist] Arden Scott was already here and she had done some plumbing in our loft in Tribeca, so she helped us out. She was a good plumber. It was very beautiful and a terrific place to have three children, and downstairs was all a big studio.”
But the studio was still not hers, and she was still scrounging her environs for materials, including a series of winged letters painted in bright primary colors that spell out the word A — R — T on the walls of the exhibition. The piece is called “The Beginning of Art.”
There used to be a pizza place on Greenport’s Main Street — it was later called Desiderio’s — and “there were workers on a ladder and they were throwing these wooden letters down from the sign.”
She salvaged the letters and attached drapery to them and The Beginning of Art was born.
Another piece, shaped like the top of a guitar, has the words “Three Word Song: I Love You,” written on it. It reads like a woman’s spin on Woody Guthrie’s famous scrawl of “This Machine Kills Fascists” on the front of his guitar, but Ms. Johnson isn’t ascribing any particular significance to it.
“Artists are that way sometimes. You just can’t say what it is,” she said.
Ms. Johnson would become an integral part of an arts scene that developed in Greenport in the mid-1990s, when Friday nights could sustain an extended gallery crawl.
She even developed a concept called “Art Money,” in which artists would create their own money and exchange it throughout the community for goods and services.
It was not her first entrepreneurial idea. She had once owned a gallery in New York called the Hundred Dollar Gallery, where everything cost $100. Unlike many galleries today that take as much as 50 percent of an artist’s sales, she took 10 or 20 percent, making just $10 or $20 per sale.
“It was a big economic failure, but the idea was that we were all gonna be equal,” she said. “Everyone had an ‘artist rights transfer agreement,’ which was one of the things that we’d all been fighting for. I didn’t do it for the money. I never did anything for the money — except get a job when I needed one.”
But she’s unimpressed with the rate of progress women have made toward being taken seriously as artists.
“I think there are more female artists and probably more being shown, but the number of women showing in the big galleries in New York and in the big museums is still minuscule compared to the guys,” she said. “I don’t know when that will ever change.”
But here, at the library, the themes she’s explored throughout her life have received a warm welcome.
“The alchemical capabilities of the artist—a potent idea embodied by the classical myth of Pygmalion’s living statue—is explored in [Johnson’s] Creature assemblages,” according to Ms. Grant’s overview of the show. “Similarly, Johnson plays with the possibilities of self-transformation in the photographic series Hatshepsut. Having recently rediscovered photos of herself at age eighteen, Johnson decided, over fifty years later, that she preferred to take on the guise of a bearded female pharaoh.”
There was a moment when Greenport “had a very bustly art scene,” says Ms. Johnson.” There was the Yellow House, and a gallery upstairs in the Ice House, and then there were a couple of other ones. You could do a real art crawl. It kind of reminded me of good old New York City in the day. But that sort of fell apart at some point. Jonathan Weiskopf tried to get something going at VSOP Gallery, but now he’s moved up to Hudson. I think Kara Hoblin is doing a fabulous job with the North Fork Art Collective, but it’s hard. It burns you out.”
But she is optimistic that art will continue to endure.
“Why does the world need artists? Why does a person need to dream?” she said. “We’re in such trouble — we’re talking about how AI is going to end it all within 10 years, when I’m sleeping. But art will go on as long as the world goes on.”
The Floyd Memorial Library is located at 539 First Street in Greenport. “Poppy Johnson Introspective” is on view through Nov. 29, with an opening reception to be held on Friday, September 18, between 5 and 7 p.m.
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