Q&A with Artist Tamara Johnson, 2022-23 Freund Fellow

Artist Tamara Johnson was the 2022-23 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. A collaboration between the Sam Fox School and the Saint Louis Art Museum, the fellowship is comprised of teaching a course in the school’s College of Art and producing work for a solo exhibition at the museum. Here, Johnson recounts her time in St. Louis teaching and making work alongside MFA-VA graduate students.

What was it like coming to St. Louis for the fellowship?
I applied for the fellowship because it was such an amazing, unique opportunity. You don’t often see this full package of stipend, teaching, exhibition, and working with students. I was over the moon when I was chosen.

I had a baby in the fall of 2022, so I came to campus with my 7-week-old and my husband in early 2023 for the spring semester. Driving up to St. Louis from Texas was a really important, transitional time for me. I was nervous about getting back to work, but also very excited. When I arrived, I thought WashU’s architecture and campus were beautiful, and I found so many interesting, gritty, wonderful spots in the city.

What did you think of your time at WashU?
From the beginning, everyone was incredibly welcoming and made the process seamless. The ability to teach, work in the studio, and be a mother to a baby worked out so well. It provided a big boost of confidence in my studio practice and life.

Being at WashU for an entire semester, with a studio in Weil Hall, I was able to really get to know some of the undergraduate and MFA-VA students. So often, visiting artists pop in for a day or two and do a few studio visits. It was great having an extended time table, allowing me the ability to observe how the student’s work was developing and evolving. It was so great to be part of the community and faculty in that way.

The Freund Fellowship includes teaching a class — what was that experience like?
The class I taught was all about concrete and how it can hold different metaphors and meanings at once. We looked at the history of concrete in a cultural context and at concrete applications in the built environment — exploring architecture, brutalism, memorials, and monuments. We also examined it as a material in contemporary sculpture and DIY applications, like the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

Concrete is such an interesting material because it can feel like an overwhelming, industrial, demise-of-an-ecosystem technology that you can’t stop. But it’s also a material that’s very democratic. You can buy a bag of concrete at the hardware store for $6, mix it with water, and make rock. There’s this kind of utility, hope, and levity to it.

For the class, we visited a lot of sites around St. Louis — the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park, the National Building Arts Center, even St. Louis Lambert International Airport, where the dome concrete structure was designed by Minoru Yamaski [and Gyo Obato, AB ’45], who had also designed the Pruitt-Igoe apartments. We did a lot of mixing our own recipes and casting concrete into different rubber molds. We all failed, succeeded, and learned together.

What was it like to work alongside graduate students?
I’m really energized by talking with other artists and sharing studio momentum. There’s an ebb and flow when you’re spending time with artists, and sometimes you’re riding high and sometimes you’re commiserating. I really embraced the porousness of the studios and feel the students embraced me as well — they would stop by often and check in on me and my daughter. I tried to give back to them as much as they gave me, and I think that makes me a better artist and better teacher.

What does materiality mean to you?
I think what drew me to object-making in general was how material can convey a message or unravel a metaphor. The ways in which you can control it can create a narrative and provide an entry point to a recontextualized moment. I’ve been in love with material’s ability to bring you close and guide you away ever since I started making objects as an undergraduate student.

I like to go into a collaboration with material to make it say something beyond my ability to control it. I’ve gotten really good at controlling some materials, and then others, like concrete, are really challenging. Sometimes the materiality really dictates what you can do and what it can say. That process never gets old for me.

What work did you make for the museum here?
All of the work for the Saint Louis Art Museum is new work. There’s an installation of sculpture in a gallery and a video essay that’s in a black box area. Many of the objects in the installation involve looking at how material is formed or transformed, and it’s often by a mold. The mold might be a stand-in for a system that dictates progress, how the body fits into a space, where the body oozes out of a space. I think about the body a lot in my work — this undefinable goo — and how we contain it or let it fall apart.

At the same time, a lot of the ideas for the pieces were incubating while I was in St. Louis and came from research I did around the 1904 World’s Fair. Baking companies at that time were standardizing and making popular the soda cracker. There was a company based in Missouri that introduced baking soda into this cracker recipe to make it puff up when baked. The sculptures in the installation, which I see as an expanded still life, started with a series of pewter saltine crackers on a faux lawn chair, and spun into other ideas of value: processed cheese and waffle cones, tickets and gold stars.

What sticks out from your experience? Any favorite spots in St. Louis?
I can’t say enough how wonderful my experience as the Freund Fellow was, literally from the day I got to St. Louis. Amy Hauft and Jack Risley built this scaffolding of support for me to succeed, and it’s had a huge impact on me and my career. Many other exciting things have come out of this fellowship, and I’m so grateful for that. It’s been a ten out of ten!

There are so many good spots in St. Louis! Forest Park and some of the touristy spots like the Saint Louis Zoo and Missouri Botanical Garden were great. Getting a little more specific, I loved the National Building Arts Center, the Weldon Spring Site, and the giant hardware store, Menards.

About the Freund Fellowship
Established in 1986, the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellowship promotes the exhibition of contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum, as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles in the Sam Fox School. The fellowship centers around two core components: teaching in the College of Art and producing work for a solo exhibition for the museum’s Currents series.