Joni T. Johnson

Reprinted from the Indianapolis News, June, 1988
By MARION GARMIL

Joni Johnson died last week.

You won’t have read much about her in the last couple of years because she suffered from diabetes and had lost both legs.

But from the 1950s to late ’70s, she was a familar sight around town, whipping through galleries and curio shops with one-afternoon shows and sales of her art. In 1977, she had what amounted to a mini-retrospective in the Art Pavillion at L.S. Ayres downtown.

Her wispy watercolors of round-eyed children and sadfaced Victorian girls, sometimes decorated with poems and splatters, brought untold pleasure to the large number of people who collected them, including Harry Belafonte, Joel Grey and Vincent Price who trooped through Indianapolis at one time or another with theatrical ventures.

She wasn’t taken seriously by the `art crowd,’ but if one definition of artist is an ability to create a recognizable universe, then she was an artist beyond dispute. You can recognize her paintings anywhere.

Blond and pretty, she was always fighting a battle with weight, and never winning.

Born Joan T . Johnson in Swayzee, Ind., 54 years ago, she attended Tech High School and the old John Herron Art Institute and was a founder of the Talbott Street Art Fair. She was married for a short time to Merle Griggs, which is why the obituaries read `City artist Joan Griggs dead at 54.’

But nobody knew her by that name. She always signed her paintings J.T. Johnson .

She had one son, Merle Griggs, Jr., who survives.

This writer did not come to Indianapolis until 1970, so missed most of her glory years. But music and drama critic Charles Staff, who has been with The News since 1955, wrote this memoir before he left on vacation last week:

`I think I first saw her around the Herron Art Museum Neighborhood–she may have been a student at Herron at that time in the late 1950s when she was pretty but pretty big and, at one time, had blue hair and always thick mascara. She was ahead of her time, a late-’60s lady in the late ’50s.

`At about that time or a bit later she had a studio upstairs at the southwest corner of Alabama and 16th Streets that she called Belle Reve, after Blanche Dubois’ lost plantation in Tennessee Williams’ `A Streetcar Named Desire.’

`When Mary Beth Edelson founded the APA–Association of Professional Artists–which included Floyd Hopper, Amanda Block and a few others–I asked Mary Beth how they determined who could belong, and she said something or other about artistic standards. I answered that professionals made their living at whatever they did.

`In that sense, Joni was the only professional artist I knew in Indianapolis at the time. She made her living painting. She didn’t teach. She didn’t work in a store. She didn’t have a husband paying her bills. She painted, probably too much and too often the same thing, more or less, but by God, she painted and she sold.

`Her work, think what you will of it, was always popular. And if creating a recognizable world is part of the artistic process, Joni did that. `You could walk in a room filled with paintings and know hers, those watercolors peopled with blue-paint-and-black-ink people, all wistful and, so often, not connected with each other.

`She also lived and worked in Chicago for a time and it seems to me her colors moved from blues to earth tones at that time.

`She was never the `girl next door’ but she would have made a fascinating next-door neighbor, I think, sweet, dreamy, funny and wonderfully bizarre.’