May 16 – June 20, 2026
Susan R. Johnson: Blueprint for Happiness
gallery neptune & brown
In Person Viewing:
1530 14th Street, NW
Washington DC 20005
Online Viewing:
https://www.galleryneptunebrown.com/
gallery neptune & brown is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with Susan R. Johnson, Blueprint for Happiness. In this exhibition, Johnson builds upon her previous Symmetrical Bodies series, debuting a new body of work entitled My Teenage Years. The series is a foray into the material and commercial culture of the 1960s-1970s. Johnson explores the level of control, scrutiny, and pressure placed on women to “manufacture” happiness and perfection in both bodily image and domestic spaces.
This exhibition weaves together both Johnson’s personal history growing up in mid-century modern America with a mother deeply invested in self-fashioning, and Johnson’s research-based investigation of consumer culture aimed at women and girls. Influenced by art historical movements ranging from the Renaissance to Surrealism, Johnson creates exaggerated feminine archetypes using imagery from 1960s-1970s print media and popular culture. Through this lens, she explores the female body as both an object and a manufactured ideal. Johnson combines painting, printmaking, and photography on a small and large scale in order to create nuanced mixed-media pieces that reflect the extreme ideals of femininity and the cultural control of the time.
Johnson states: “’Blueprint for Happiness” comes from a post-World War II advertising slogan for Silex coffee makers, which promised perfect coffee every time–and, by extension, a perfect home…The campaign targeted homemakers with the assurance that happiness could be engineered through consumption. This promise of self-improvement through domestic ideals forms a conceptual backbone for My Teenage Years.”
Johnson was born in San Francisco, California, in the late 1950s. After earning a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University, she earned an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Columbia University. Her work has been featured in over fifty solo exhibitions, over one hundred group exhibitions, and numerous permanent collections such as the Muscarelle Museum of Art, The Menil Collection, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum Libraries. Johnson is Professor of Art at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.