Crossing the Date-Line

Ynez Johnston

"Crossing the Date-Line" was published by Roten Galleries which was based in Baltimore, Maryland. Roten sold prints through pop-up exhibitions at universities, museums, and private galleries throughout the U.S. and Canada. As a result an artist's work got national exposure and was often collected for the institution's collection.

Scholar/curator Gerald Nordland noted about Johnston's graphic work: "Johnston utilizes the multiple perspective devices of the etchings, flattens space, integrates foreground, mid-ground and background into a Byzantine-modern composition. The units of effect....has a forceful, expressive, and abstract quality not dissimilar to the stone tessare in Byzantine mosaics. The total effect is formal, unique and masterful."

Her work was also discussed by her poet husband John Berry for the International Graphic Arts Society: "Man - cosmological and metaphysical - is the referent and point of departure for the symbol-like forms which Johnston has developed, although these defy identification with recognizable objects. The forms of man's culture are seen as parts of a living organism, of man himself: not 'mere' man as the segmented biped, but as the expanding universe of his consciousness. The architecture with which he has encrusted the earth partakes of the turbulent life of its builder....cities, cultivated regions, diversified and discrete, all are alive, and all - sometimes through the mediation of himself as a beast - all are a part of this single, mythical, human organism."

Ynez Johnston was born in Berkeley, California on May 12, 1920. As a child, her family encouraged her artistic tendencies by enrolling her in Saturday classes at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and with excursions to the de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Ynez later attended the University of California at Berkeley, receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1941 and the Bertha B. Taussig Memorial Award for the outstanding graduate in fine arts. Her instructors, Worth Ryder, Erle Loran and Margaret Peterson, introduced her to work of Picasso, Klee, Miro and Braque.

In the early 1940s, Johnston traveled to Mexico to continue her studies but returned to Berkeley in 1943 eventually earning her Masters of Fine Arts in 1946. In 1949, she summered in Paris and then relocated to the Los Angeles area in the fall. Finding herself without a studio or press, Leonard Edmondson, a friend from college, opened his printmaking studio to her. She experimented with intaglio and woodcut and began to do sculpture in 1950.

Johnston taught at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Chouinard Art Institute, California State College, University of Judaism, and Otis Art Institute. She was awarded the Anne Bremer Award in 1949, Huntington Hartford Residence in 1951 and 1957, Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 1952, Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 1955 and 1956, James D. Phelan Grant in 1958, MacDowell Colony Residency Grant in 1959, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976, 1985, and 1986. In 1992, the Fresno Art Museum honored Johnston with their Distinguished Woman Artist award and a retrospective of her work was mounted at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in 1998.

Ynez Johnston died in Los Angeles, California on 13 March, 2019.