Tonika Johnson, a 2024 Gordon Parks Foundation Art Fellow, is a photographer, activist, and lifelong resident of Englewood, a neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side. Her work, which investigates the long history of segregation in the city and racist housing practices such as redlining, reframes the narrative of divested South Side communities and mobilizes people and resources for positive change.
As a teenager growing up in Englewood, Johnson was inspired to choose the camera as a tool for social justice when she encountered Gordon Parks’s work. She began by photographing everyday lives in her own community, capturing the pride, joy, and resilience there and defying stereotypical portrayals of Greater Englewood as blighted, poor, and crime-ridden. Since then, her vision of justice has expanded to innovative collaborations, public art installations, and community initiatives that have led to policy change, historic preservation, and neighborhood revitalization—endeavors contributing to the economic stability of Greater Englewood and the wealth-building capacity of its residents. This exhibition includes selections from several of these projects, together with short documentary films about Johnson’s work. Accompanying these are a poem by Englewood author Leslé Honoré and photographs taken by Gordon Parks in Chicago—a city where he briefly resided in the 1940s and to which he returned while on assignments for Life magazine. Extending Parks’s legacy, Johnson demonstrates how artistic practices can be implements for advocacy and change.
