Artists

Artist Bio

Chido Johnson was born in Nyadiri, Zimbabwe. He received Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Sculpture in 1996 and in Painting, with a minor in Drawing, in 1997 from the University of Georgia, Athens. He obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from the University of Notre Dame, IN in 2000. Currently, he is the Section Chair of Sculpture at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally. www.chidox.com

ArtX Project Description

Title: Installations: The Wire Car Parking Lot exhibition at Tech II; Video Projection: a dance for Diego; Sculptural Object: me, me, me
Medium: Video/Mixed Media
Year Created: 2011
Description: Chido Johnson will be exhibiting two pieces at MOCAD, and will also have an installation at Techtown, along with a performance outside of the DIA for Art X Detroit. The two pieces at MOCAD are a video titled a dance for Diego and a small ebony carved tourist object titled me me me. The video is a documentation of a wire-car cruise on the historical Woodward Avenue performed to the formation of Detroit’s version of soul train, The Scene. The participants were requested to make their dream car and choose their favorite cruising song for the performance. The cruising music and wire-cars made by diverse communities within Detroit, its vicinity and others as far as Zimbabwe, will be exhibited to a scaled parking structure in the lobby of the old Dalgleish Cadillac Dealership, now Techtown. As a dance for Diego celebrates our community as individuals, me me me, originally a tourist object from Kenya which was then carved upon transforming it into a self portrait of the artist, questions the public’s assumptions of the individual. Having lived between two cultures, the United States and Zimbabwe, has led Chido’s work to persistently locate cultural spaces identified as other and different in an attempt to find physical or narrative performances to transform and negotiate a new sense of self, place and belonging. www.wirecarcruise.com, www.chidox.com