Paddy Johnson is a New York-based art educator and entrepreneur. She is the Founder and CEO of VVrkshop LLC, a company that includes running the artist membership Netvvrk, founded in 2021.
Early life
Johnson was born in
Guelph,
Ontario. She was educated at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, and continued her education at Rutgers University. She has slowly gained notoriety as an
art critic in the New York art scene. She is also known for her live coverage of major art fairs such as the
Armory Show,
Venice Biennale, Frieze Art Fair, and
Art Basel in Miami and Switzerland.
Career
Coaching Artists
Johnson created Netvvrk to support mid-career artists. Netvvrk includes a membership portal that allows artists to communicate with a community of peers, access a curriculum addressing the needs of creative small business owners, receive online artist mentoring, participate in workshops, connect with prominent arts professionals, and engage in critical art review.
Johnson found that creating and running a platform for artists to connect directly was more effective in helping greater numbers of artists build their careers than by doing piecemeal, teaching.
Netvvrk has helped artists get more than 1M in grants in the first two years of its existence.
Teaching
Johnson got her start teaching in the NYU Cinema Studies Department.
Publishing
She penned a regular column for
L Magazine in New York. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including
ArtReview, Art & Australia, Art in America, Artkrush, The Daily Beast,
FlashArt, Flavorpill,
The Guardian,
The Huffington Post,
,
More Intelligent Life,
New York Press, NYFA Current, Print (magazine),
The Reeler, Time Out NY.
She attended the 2007 iCommons conference in Croatia as a blogger. In 2008, she served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships and became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital which is part of the Andy Warhol Foundation. She has also served on a panel for ArtPrize.
She contributed to Paper Monument's first book, I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette.
In December, 2011, Johnson was named in a federal libel lawsuit in United States district court for a May, 2011 article she published in Art Fag City, which suggested an art restorer was a forger and committed crimes.
Sound of Art
In November 2010 Johnson released an
LP album called "Now That's What You Call Net Art", a DJ
battle record that compiles mixes based from sounds recorded in art spaces, galleries, and museums in Manhattan and Brooklyn, pitting the neighboring boroughs against each other.
Johnson raised over $11,000
with a
Kickstarter campaign to fund the project, calling upon sound art lovers and a cadre of collectors to pre-purchase the album. Johnson predicted the project would spawn follow-up records, including East Coast vs. West Coast, and Canada vs. USA.
Johnson told
WNYC's Carolina Miranda that the Brooklyn recordings sound more
DIY.
Podcast
Johnson is the host and founder of the popular podcast "Art Problems," for ambitious artists who want more shows, bigger grants, and better residencies, since 2022
See also
External links
