Artist Tonika Lewis Johnson in Conversation with Janine Mileaf

Photographer and social justice artist Tonika Johnson speaks with Executive Director Janine Mileaf in the midst of multiple Chicago projects. Currently featured in the We, Women photography exhibition on the Bloomingdale Trail, Johnson’s Folded Map Project (formerly shown at the MCA) visually investigates disparities among “map twins”—Chicago residents who live on opposite ends of the same streets across the city’s racial and economic divides—and brings them together to have a conversation. In 2019, Johnson was named one of Field Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago and is now serving her second year as appointed member of the Cultural Advisory Council of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events by the Chicago City Council. In her role as the National Public Housing Museum’s 2021 Artist as Instigator, she has worked on a project titled Inequity for Sale, which highlights the living history of Greater Englewood homes sold on Land Sale Contracts in the 1950s and 1960s.