Duwenavue Sante Johnson
Duwenavue Sante Johnson works where story, craft, and care meet. She was raised in an environment that valued oral tradition and lived creativity—weekend blues sets at home, grandparents who taught love, truth, honor, respect, grace, and service, and a mother whose singing made storytelling a way of life. Books were devoured, recipes were literature, and memory was a practice. Those early values remain the spine of her work.
Johnson trained through the trades rather than a single academy: Haute Couture Embroidery and Beading at École Lesage (Paris), a Certificate and Diploma with Merit from the Royal School of Needlework (Surrey), Zardosi embroidery (Atelier Zardosi, Paris), a certificate from The Han Sang Soo Embroidery Museum (Seoul), a Jewelry Technician Diploma from the Revere Academy (San Francisco), Hawaiian traditional feather lei-making at Nā Lima Mili Hulu Noʻeau (Honolulu), and, foundationally, Thai language, decorative arts, and mural studies during a three-year stay in Thailand apprenticing with artists from Poh Chang at Wat Tri Totsathep Worawihan. She learned materials first—what they can hold, what they can heal—then built an art practice around function, precision, and meaning.
Her medium base is textile—hand embroidery, beading, appliqué, collage—often in dialogue with painting, print, and found materials. Themes recur: migration, fracture and transformation, identity that resists boxes, memory and inheritance, resilience. Series like Suspended Memories (flight, roadlines, the pause where past, present, and future collide) and Things Falling Apart (collecting and reassembling fragments) use slow, exacting labor to speak about repair and becoming. A large-scale project—a 13' × 22' flag assembled from 273 bandanas—was completed while she underwent treatment for stage-4 liver cancer; made with many hands over a year, it became a public grammar of identity, transparency, and forward motion.
Johnson aligns her studio ethics with an eco-component and the slow art movement. She is drawn to heraldic detail and symbolic “founding values,” but just as readily to the fluidity of watercolor, gouache, and handmade stencils. Her process rests on “pathways, journeys, and balance”: research, handwork, repetition, and the eye-hand-heart loop; teaching and peer exchange as catalysts; questions first, outcomes second. When inspiration thins, she leans into inquiry and movement—“lean into the sharp edges”—trusting that previously unimagined spaces open with the next stitch.
Influences range widely: Montien Boonma, James Turrell, William Morris, Seydou Keïta, Chiura Obata, Ruth Asawa, Jeanne Lanvin, Jane Campion; Philadelphia’s Henry Ossawa Tanner; the renowned and unsung artists of the Harlem Renaissance; and works like Nicolas Daubanes’s Palais de Tokyo – L’Huile et l’Eau. Each, in different ways, affirms craft, time, light, civic relationship, and the endurance of spirit.
Her message is consistent: we are interconnected. History is weight and thread. Fragmentation carries value. Beauty and pain bind us. The work invites stillness amid motion, social cohesion over spectacle, belonging across time. Audience members often describe a felt sense of confidence and self-worth; Johnson describes success simply as showing up and doing the work.
Upcoming:
Quiet Observations, solo exhibition, A.I.R. Gallery, Gallery III, 155 Plymouth St., Brooklyn, NY 11201 (August 9–September 7, 2025). Opening Reception: Saturday, August 9, 6–8 pm. Recent hand embroidery, collage, and painting exploring history, time, memory, balance, and stillness.
Radical Americana (2026), a U.S. semiquincentennial exhibition in collaboration with The Philadelphia Historical Society, The Clay Studio, and Winterthur Museum.
Johnson’s practice is inseparable from life: family care, community, music, theater, laughter, nature. The studio is a commons where repair is visible, where elders’ teachings—wisdom, balance, truth—become method. Her advice to emerging artists is characteristic and precise: follow your intuition, stay hungry for learning, ask questions, and keep going. Stay true to yourself.
