Today we’d like to introduce you to Mia Johnson.
Hi Mia, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I moved around from state to state as a child/adolescent with my parents and four siblings. I’m including this information because I think it helped me to secure a better grasp on my sense of self. By moving around, I was introduced to cultures and experiences outside of my own which I believe to this day contribute to my understanding of the world and my place within it.
I’ve always gravitated towards art as a way to communicate ideas, not so much as an expression or outlet of/for emotion, etc.
This led me to pursue my BFA in Studio Arts from Kent State University. When I was there, I also managed to tack on a BA in Art History. The faculty there were absolute rockstars- I was excited to go to class and learn- they were my biggest motivators. Equal emphasis was placed on both form/technical mastery as well as conceptual research and art as a tool for visual communication. This nuanced balance of technique VS idea led to a very successful undergraduate class that I was proud to be a part of-
I didn’t add my BA in Art History until my third year of undergrad when I fell in love during John-Michael Warner’s Art History class with artists like Felix Gonzales-Torres, Robert Gober, Eva Hesse, Lorna Simpson, Agnes Martin, Ana Mendieta, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.
I began applying to graduate schools and ended up at Ohio University, where I began assisting the gallery director in exhibition prep: install, deinstall, curation, marketing, general admin- and I loved it! I assisted the director during the three years of my graduate program. Myself and my practice went through a lot of growing pains while attending OU and if I were to do it again, I may have held off for a few more years before starting. While challenging, it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career at that point in time.
Today, I’m in the middle of fall semester during my second year as assistant professor of studio art at Missouri Valley College. This fall, I also began directing the exhibition space on campus, the Morris Gallery of Contemporary Art. Missouri Valley College is a private liberal arts college situated in Marshall, Missouri, a small agricultural town about 90 minutes east of KC. The Morris Gallery provides an opportunity for students to see and experience artwork in a professional setting that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. During my first year as Gallery Director, I’m bringing in and displaying work from local artists as well as MVC students and faculty. I’d love to use this space as an opportunity for both experiential learning and professional practice.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The challenges in undergraduate and graduate school were so focused in on myself and my own practice. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to teach in graduate school, but Missouri Valley College brings challenges unique to smaller institutions that were not a concern at the larger state schools I studied at-
The art department specifically struggles with the adequacy of its space and facilities and funding. I think this is fairly standard across art departments in smaller private colleges. We get creative and do the best we can with what we have, but it’s difficult as an instructor to see students struggling due to outside limitations.
As a new instructor, I’m still very green, I’m often worried about letting my students down as I want to give them the best education possible. Turnover rate is high, which is also disheartening- the students deserve some continuity.
Still, I’m excited to see them grow with the program. The new full time faculty in Design and I are currently working towards a total revamp of the BFA/BA programs and we’re excited to get on a new track.
I’ve also recently introduced screenprinting to MVC’s studio with the help of a few former professors. By continuing to offer more opportunities for success, I’m hoping we can better prepare the next generation of artists for life after graduation.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m an interdisciplinary artist with a background in fine art/craft Printmaking as well as Art History. My work throughout my undergraduate and graduate programs expanded on definitions of fatness and its conflicts with morality. I read and studied the works of Aubrey Gordon and Sondra Solovay as well as Michel Foucault. My work investigated the way fatness is moralized in contemporary culture, thereby justifying the discipline and exploitation of the fat femme body. Using sculptural elements, my work placed viewers into the uncomfortable positions of shame and empathy. My work encouraged the viewer to dispute their own pre-conditioned ideas about fat bodies.
Since graduating from Ohio University with my MFA, I began investigating my own body as a liminal space, capable of making massive changes. I began with a video performance of me exercising in a sauna suit, where I collected the accumulated sweat and later mixed it into screen printing ink. I used this ink to screenprint the message “ONLY A MATTER OF TIME” on a large sheet of paper before the screen cuts to black and the performance ends.
I had noticed an increase in my desire to lose weight and become thin. These thoughts are compulsive, triggered by something as simple as enjoying a meal or sitting in a chair. It’s constant, filtering any experience in your current body through the idea of how much “better” it could be in a thinner one.
Printmaking is a craft/fine art process that is dependent on its matrix to produce multiples, and its use of archival materials to ensure longevity. Prints are made to last and by mixing my sweat into the once archival ink, the print will degrade over time, unable to conform to printmaking’s most innate expectation.
Like printmaking, weight loss is encouraged for posterity’s sake. It’s an “investment” for a better future, but what’s not discussed is the failure rate of large instances of weight loss. Over 80% of people gain back the weight they lost, and a third of them end up heavier than they were when they started. It’s ‘only a matter of time’ until the print degrades, until I’m thin, and until I’m fat again.
Shortly after creating this piece, I began my longest performance yet- I began intentionally losing weight and documenting my body’s changes. I purposefully framed my weight loss through the lens of performance- aware of the aforementioned statistic that I very well may gain all of the weight back. By framing it as a performance, I also refuse to forget or stop acknowledging the suffering directly and indirectly inflicted on fat people during this era of semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy, etc.). While proving how much easier it is to move through spaces now- things seemingly innocuous to people in smaller bodies become the difference of inclusion or ostracization to those in larger bodies.
However, as my body shrinks, I feel less able/ill-prepared to contribute to the discussion of fat liberation. It’s a constantly changing landscape and my body now affords me certain freedoms it was formerly unable to. With this shift in weight, I’ve also began shifting my practice.
I’m still researching weight, appetite, consumption, and morality, but have since began changing my focus. One of my most recent pieces was exhibited in a group show at Vulpes Bastille in June. It consisted of 20 laser engraved slices of bread, each of them featuring the image of a fat, nude woman.
I gave my partner a vintage BBW magazine for his 25th birthday the summer after I finished my MFA.
What started as a gag gift became a study on consumption. What does it mean to consume VS be consumed?
Fat porn and the people who enjoy it are seen as “kinky” and cast off as fetishists. The category itself, “BBW,” marks the content as other. In contrast, the sexualization of thin bodies is rarely seen as fetish, it’s just “normal.” This reveals a cultural double standard, where thinness is equated with control, discipline, even virtue, while fatness becomes symbolic of excess, indulgence, and moral failure.
The magazine series that inspired this piece, “PLUMPERS & Big Women”, brought me to concepts of over-indulgence, excess, and the sinful desire for more. Women’s appetites, whether for food or for sex, are to be moderated, if not outright suppressed. To eat too much, to want too much, to take up space- these are read not only as personal flaws, but as moral ones.
Wonder Bread, an American white sandwich loaf consisting of 20 perfect slices in a cheerful plastic bag became the backdrop of my plumpers and big women. White bread, a nutritionally void, culturally “bad” carbohydrate, plays the role of visual and symbolic base. It mirrors the way we moralize consumption- empty, excessive, and shameful. In this way, the pairing becomes a recursive loop- fetish porn on fetish food.
Since my weight loss and shift in focus, I’ve gone back to the earliest foundations of my practice: printmaking as craft. My work begins in printmaking but pushes against its traditions of permanence, precision, and control. I use the language of craft (edition, matrix, archive) to examine the instability of the body and the systems that seek to regulate it. Through humor, desire, and material decay, I explore the intersections of consumption, sexuality, morality, and identity. Fatness, appetite, and discipline become recurring motifs, revealing the contradictions in how we moralize the body and its pleasures. By disrupting printmaking’s expectation of endurance and embracing degradation, I reimagine the medium as a living, fallible body, one that resists containment and insists on transformation.
We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
I have music playing constantly, whether I’m teaching or in the studio, or just getting up to brush my teeth in the morning, I will always have something playing.
current favorite songs are:
-It Girl by the Brian Jonestown Massacre
-My Stove’s on Fire by Robert Lester Folsom
-You Are Mine by Jay Robinson
-Nothing Wrong with Me by The Buttress
-Manhole by TsuShiMaMiRe
-Inside And Out by Feist
-Tyrone (cover) by My Morning Jacket
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hostileheifer.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hostileheifer/?hl=en
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mia-johnson-51b45314b/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@hostileheifer
