When Through 10/14
Pozzi-Johnson was raised as a churchgoing Methodist in a Pittsburgh suburb. When she was nine, a family drive through Georgia gave her a glimpse of rural poverty, and she says it was then that she began to think in terms of social justice–still a concern as important to her as art. In 1970, after a year in college, she joined Koinonia Farm, a Christian community working with the rural poor in Georgia. “I saw people who were living with rats in their mattresses,” she says. “I would drive them to appointments and help them arrange to buy homes.” Moving to Chicago in 1972 to attend the American Academy of Art, she began to paint and did street murals with Uptown kids; later she taught art workshops for the disabled. “I believe that the divine lives within each of us,” she says. She began a portrait series of people who were developmentally and mentally challenged after graduating with an associate’s degree in 1978. “I was trying to show their dignity by being very honest and straightforward,” she says. “One man who was very shy sat in a corner rather than on a chair, and I painted him there.”
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Carlos J. Ortiz (portrait).
