Rebecca Johnson grew up in an art-centric family in rural Hopewell, New Jersey.

Her parents were designers, artists and art educators. “Life is art” was the family

credo. This philosophy enriched and continues to inform Rebecca’s art and

career.

As a young artist, Rebecca dedicated herself to a professional career. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art and her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She studied bronze casting at the Johnson Atelier in New Jersey and stone carving in quarries in Vermont. Grants, fellowships, exhibitions in galleries and museums, commissions, critical acclaim, and teaching positions at Dartmouth and Kenyon Colleges distinguished her career.

A fulcrum of change occurred when the British American Arts Council awarded her a three-month fellowship to work in Northwest Wales. In this land of stone walls, craggy mountains, wild coast and rich folkloric history, Rebecca’s ideas gestated. Time and solitude created space for her to thoroughly see and imbibe the light, color and form of the land. Her exterior and interior visions integrated and enhanced each other. The power of place revealed the landscape as an essential part of her visual vocabulary.

Rebecca returned home to Philadelphia, where her next project was the transformation of a cavernous train depot into a designer showroom for Material Culture in Philadelphia. The experience of creating rich earth tone and midnight blue murals, one hundred feet long and thirty feet high, revealed new possibilities of scale, space, and personal transformation. She packed her tools, cats and dog and headed west.

In 1997, she settled in Mendocino County, Northern California, where she established her studio in a renovated barn and began creating the sculpture garden that has evolved alongside her work for nearly three decades. The studio doors open to a hillside meadow filled with her stone sculpture. The quiet beauty of this rural place shapes her work. In recent years, she has collaborated with architects, designers, and private collectors to integrate her paintings and sculptures into private homes and outdoor settings. This sustained body of work has also been exhibited at ONNA HOUSE in East Hampton, New York, and is now represented by Maybaum Gallery in San Francisco.