Andy Johnson (he/him) is a DC-based arts writer, publisher, designer, and art historian. He is currently Senior Admin for GW’s Department of American Studies; contributing editor for Dirt; and adjunct faculty in Art History at Georgetown University, teaching courses on queer art, photography, and visual culture. He previously served as Director of Gallery 102 at the Corcoran School, and editor/creative director of Archeion: Journal of Queer Archives, published by the Stonewall National Museum & Archives. He was the 2018 Apprentice Curator for the DC Arts Center, and a 2019 Visiting Arts Writer and Critic for The Chart. Johnson is the recipient of the Curatorial Grant and three Arts & Humanities Fellowship Grants from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities (DCCAH), as well as the Wherewithal Research Grant from Washington Project for the Arts, as part of The Andy Warhol Foundation’s Regranting Program.
While his research interests are multivalent, the core of his praxis invests in a politics of care, intimacy, and vulnerability—with particular focus on their emergence in art and visual culture, and impact on the human condition. He researches, writes, and teaches on topics including: the politics of care; affect, intimacy, and failure; feeling as knowledge; heteropatriarchy, whiteness, and masculinity; a queer politics of pleasure, the erotic, queer aesthetics, and queer art history.
His work is influenced and informed by queer theory, queer-of-color critique, feminist and Black feminist theories, critical university studies, affect theory, cultural studies, porn studies, performance studies, and sexuality studies. His artistic practice interrogates queerness, masculinity, pleasure, intimacy, and the erotic. He has exhibited work at Washington Project for the Arts, Otis Street Arts Projects, Stevenson University, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, and has published his work in two Homie House Press publications — The Shadow Means It’s Real and First Fronteras.
He has curated and juried exhibitions with Clifford Chance, DCCAH, DC Arts Center, Dupont Underground, the Torpedo Factory, the Smithsonian Institution, among others. He has presented research and spoken on panels at Rutgers University, UC-Santa Barbara, University of Georgia, The Ringling Museum, UICA, Washington Project for the Arts, Association of Academic Museums & Galleries, and others. He has published essays, exhibition reviews, and catalog entries with Dirt, The Chart, The Rib, Pelican Bomb, BmoreArt, Prospect.5 and more. He holds a B.A and M.A. in Art History from The George Washington University and is currently pursuing a M.P.S. in Publishing from GW’s College of Professional Studies.
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