Poppy Johnson was born in New York City in 1949 and grew up in Greenwich Village. She attended Barnard College, New School, Atelier 17 and the Rhode Island School of Design for very short times and then left academia to practice various art and political activities. Some were more art and some were more politics, but many were both.
Johnson left Tribeca for Greenport in 1982 and found work at Floyd Memorial Library. She started as a Clerk, and then served successively, and sometimes simultaneously, as Children’s, Youth Services, Adult Programming, Archival and Reference Librarian, and as Assistant Director. While working she finished her academic program with a B.A. from Regent’s College and a Masters in Library Information Science from Queens College.
Retired from the library since 2021, Johnson no longer has any excuse not to make a lot of art every day.
A selection of Poppy Johnson’s performances, installations, collaborations and exhibitions from 1969 to 2026
1969 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival – Wards Island, NYC
Perigee Parallax Press – postcard multiples
AWC Art Worker’s Coalition
GAAG Guerilla Art Action Group
WAR Women Artists in Revolution
1970 The People’s Flag Show at Judson Church, NYC
ART STRIKE Co-Chair with Robert Morris – New York Artists Strike Against War, Racism, Repression, and Sexism
Earth Day – a collaborative performance planting a garden in the rubble of
Hudson Market
1971 Into the Woods – site specific sculpture trail in Gardiner
The Lyrical Computer – 100 books of 100 pages each
1975 The Silver Fish are Metaphors – Installation at Printed Matter, NYC
1976 Writing about this work is this work; This work is writing about this work – performance and video installations in various locations: Artist’s Space; Leo Castelli Gallery; CAC, New Orleans; Whitney Museum Downtown; White Columns, Buffalo
1977 Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny: Making Art with 3-Year-Olds – collaborative installation and performance at PS1, NY
$100 Gallery – post-capitalist experiment selling art
1980 Time and Space Concepts in Art Symposium, Pleiades Gallery, NYC 1982 Report from Greenport – video
1990 Los Jovenes de Oaxaca – photographs, Brentwood Library;
Floyd Memorial
1999 Keatsian Equivalent – site specific sculpture, Footfalls, Greenport
2002 The Monster Women in Time and Space – photographs
2003 ART$MONEY – collaboration with artists and the Village of Greenport
2009 “talk ‘til you’re blue in the face” – collaborative mixed media installation featuring 26 artists and 26 typewriters, also a book
2015 Eruv: Witness for Peace – collaborative action with Arden Scott and Megan Barron making Greenport a sanctuary village
2023 SKYPIANO – installation of a public piano in Mitchell Park, Greenport
2024 Palimpsest, artwork created for Banned! Artists Respond to Book Banning, exhibition at Floyd Memorial Library
2025 Making Art with 3-Year-Olds, artwork created for Passing the Brush: Feminist Art NOW at Floyd Memorial Library
2026 Poppy Johnson: Introspective Exhibition on view at Floyd Memorial Library, Greenport, NY, September 18–November 29
