Book Talk with Jen White Johnson: Knox Rox
Possible Futures is excited to celebrate Autism Acceptance month with art activist and design educator, Jennifer White-Johnson, with a talk and signing of their new publication, Knox Rox! Jen will be in conversation with co-founder of Homie House Press, Adriana Monsalve.
More about the work:
Autistic joy, KNOX ROXS, a Retrospective is a publication that is advocating acceptance for the beauty of nuerodiversity and breaking the stigma of racialized Autism through documentation and text that follows one very special boy; Knox, A 5-year old black Autistic child.
Autism is a beautifully complex cognitive, invisible disability that we are honored to represent in this book. Jennifer White-Johnson, mother to Knox, has made it her creative passion to dive into the complexities of Knox’s neurodiversity. Often the neurodiverse community is excluded from artistic narratives and creative spaces, we are excited to embrace this groups complexities as we continue to embrace our own. This project comes together with her own personal art practice of photography that she uses as a means to allow herself to not be afraid to let the world in and allow for her son’s story to become a force for healing.
More about Jen:
Jen White-Johnson (she/they) is a Black and Puertorriqueña, disabled and neurodivergent art activist and design educator. Jen uses zines and collages to explore the intersection of race, disability, and care work, emphasizing redesigning ableist visual culture. Jen’s heart-centered and electric approach to disability advocacy bolsters these movements with invaluable currencies: powerful dynamic art and media that all at once educate, bridge divergent worlds, and builds a future that mirrors her Autistic son’s experience.
Jen has presented her disability justice activist work and collaborated with brands and art spaces across print and digital media, such as Coachella and Adobe. Her work has been featured in AfroPunk, NPR, and Juxtapoz Magazine, among other publications. Jen’s work is also permanently archived at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian National African American Museum of History and Culture. Jen has an MFA in Graphic Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she teaches design. She lives in Baltimore, MD, with her husband and 12-year-old son, Knox.
More about Adriana:
Adriana Monsalve (she /they) is an artist, educator, cultural worker and collaborative publisher working (mostly) in the photobook medium. Along with Caterina Ragg, Monsalve is co-founder of Homie House Press, a radical cooperative platform that challenges the ever-changing forms of storytelling with image and text.
Within her photographic practice, Monsalve is an archivist and visual communicator who produces in-depth stories on identity through the nuances in between race, gender, and immigrant adjacent experiences.
Within her cultural work as a collaborative publisher, she holds space for and with underrepresented communities through the multidisciplinary platform of Homie House Press (HHP); a cooperative playground where fotos become books, a safe space for secret stories and an open house for honest content that meets at the intersection of personal, political, and poetic. She is rigorously pushing towards finding ways for photographers and publishers to cultivate the capacity for care and tenderness within structures that actively work against their manifestations. She defines intimacy as the experience of being genuinely seen, heard, and held by another person or group of people.
More about Homie House Press:
Homie House Press is a collaborative publishing house founded by Caterina Ragg and myself, based in Baltimore, MD and Milan, IT. We focus on storytelling at the intersection of personal, political, and poetic. We center QTBIPOC and non-binary artists at an international level. We are for the redistribution of wealth as a form of reparations in our lifetime. We seek to publish work that pushes against the traditional art world at large and showcases restorative work made within community. We make art for survival. More specifically, we are challenging the way photography and text has traditionally been used within the mainstream medium of photojournalism. We are making space for the photographers of the future. We honor and uplift emerging talent, and we aim to make it possible and accessible for QTBIPOC artists to be published and take their work outside of the digital realm and make it something tangible and archival to be passed down to future generations.