Willard Johnson is a painter and installation artist whose work explores memory, identity, and belonging through layered surfaces of collage, paint, and photography. Born in Korea and raised across a complex global landscape—including Cairo, Beirut, Germany, Guam, and the U.S.—his experience formed a lifelong fascination with cultural hybridity and the palimpsest of history. The palimpsest, a guiding metaphor for his practice, reflects his first encounters with layered history: seeing ancient temples carved with Roman frescoes and modern graffiti.
His current body of work centers on large-scale, modular canvases that function as physical records of lived experience. These mural-scale pieces, built from quilted textiles, tiled photographic prints, and layered with paint and writing, are an insistence on physical encounter in an age of digital ephemerality. Johnson’s hybrid visual language merges the personal with the universal, translating the layered histories of city walls in places like Beirut into a contemporary practice that bears witness to both collective memory and the small acts of daily care.
Johnson earned his Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2015, following his Bachelor of Arts from Anderson University. He is a studio artist at the Harrison Center in Indianapolis, and currently serves as the Art Department Director at The Oaks Academy Middle School. His work and research have been supported by multiple grants, including the Teacher Creativity Fellowship (2025) and the Creative Renewal Fellowship (2023) from the Lilly Endowment, which enabled him to deepen his research into cultural preservation and identity.