Terrol Dew Johnson was probably best known as a basket weaver and sculptor, but the member of the Tohono O’odham Nation was also a health advocate committed to Indigenous food sovereignty. His longtime art collaborator Chris Lasch remembers Johnson as a thoughtful and creative community member who will be missed.
CHRIS LASCH: We got really interested in Terrol’s work when we saw some pieces of his that were included in an exhibition at the National Museum for the American Indian, when it was in Manhattan. And our practice was in New York City at that time.
And we saw this show called “Basketry From the Weaver’s Point of View” that included some traditional baskets and contemporary practitioners. And they were showing it all from the weaver’s point of view, like from the perspective of making these baskets, where they came from and the processes and materials that the weavers think about while they’re making these things.
At the time, it resonated with stuff that we were doing as young architects — using the computer and exploring similar kinds of things in terms of using algorithms to make stuff and to make designs. And we were kind of working in what we thought was kind of an avant garde area of new technology. And all of a sudden we’re reminded that “Hey, there’s like this tradition of making, in this vein that goes back millennia.”
I had a personal connection to Terroll through family and friends back in Tucson. And we were able to make a connection with him. And for Terrol’s part, he was always an innovative and progressive voice within his discipline. And this idea of exploring the similarities between computational design or working on the computer and these more traditional, basketry techniques was fascinating to him as well. And so we embarked really on a kind of initial experiment to make a collection of baskets that would merge these two points of view, these two ways of working.
Several years later, a few of those baskets were collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
He was an amazing guy. He was an artist and he was an activist, and we engaged with him. We got connected to him through his art. But over time, we learned more about the depth of his work in the community that spanned — it became apparent that his artwork was just a kind of piece of his larger project that was about a kind of big project of cultural revitalization for the health wellness and the wellbeing of his whole community. His ethic was to look back to their traditional life ways of the O’odham people, the Tohono O’odham Himdag, to find wisdom from which he could create solutions for future or the contemporary problems that his community was facing.
And so Native arts and artistic revitalization was part of it. And he was kind of emblematic of this evolution of that artwork through his learning of the traditional techniques and evolving them, on his own and through us, to create contemporary work that evolved these traditions.
He was very active in Native food sovereignty and the revitalization of his family’s farm. That goes back generations on the reservation and continues to operate under the management of his brother, Nolan Johnson.
Terrol was remarkable because all this work that he was doing with the community, a large part of his role was to share that work with the wider world. And so when we lost Terrol, we not only lost an energetic and effective community activist, but we also lost like an important voice that brought the issues and culture of that community to the wider world, through his work, through his art and exhibitions that that went beyond the traditional spaces and encodings of “Native” American artwork to being recognized as just a contemporary artist.
