Naomi Johnson
(they/she)
“I make objects out of metal that express elusive feelings of alienation tied to my Black, American, and queer identities. Influenced by West African design, I integrate and reinterpret traditional designs to create my own visual language that reflects my experience living in the diaspora. My work explores themes of queerness, belonging, kinship, dis/connection, and cultural (il)legibility at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Black and queer futurity are cornerstones of my design practice as I pull from ancestral and contemporary influences to both reclaim my cultural lineage and imagine new possibilities for self-definition and collective liberation.”
Naomi Johnson (they/she) is an artist and researcher based in Chicago, IL. They began metalsmithing in 2021, developing their skills in a local studio. Naomi started their handmade, small-batch jewelry business, Metal Petal Jewelry, in February 2023. Through it, they design and sell ready-to-wear and custom pieces. Naomi’s work has been exhibited nationally, and their practice includes both wearable pieces and sculptural objects. In addition to their creative practice, they co-lead Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and are deeply invested in reducing the harms of the legal system.
How does your work relate to the theme of flourish(ing)?
“From the same cloth is an exploration of transition through time, distance, and cultural context. A weight from the Ashanti kingdom in modern-day Ghana, used for measuring gold, anchors the piece. As a descendant of enslaved people, this weight is a physical representation of my severed lineage. The negative space bound by the weight and the flowing silver shapes forms a simple four-petaled flower, representing the gendered and racial expectations of African American concepts of selfhood; the strange silver shapes growing outside that flower stand in for my choice to exist outside these bounds as a queer person. The piece represents being both rooted in what came before and totally unlike it. Flourishing beyond ascribed norms of society.”
"from the same cloth", Sterling silver, Akan bronze weight, and pearl, 4” x 3.5” x 2.5”, 2025
Photographs Courtesy of the Artist
NYCJW25 @ UrbanGlass, Queer Metalsmiths
S Sanchez
they/them
Juror’s Choice
Our jurors for [queerphoria] vol. 5: flourish each chose an artist’s work that they wanted to highlight from the exhibition.
“Imagine 2,000 years from now, in a time when the people have returned to living with the land, S Sanchez’s Double €aguar Rattle is unearthed by our queer progeny after undergoing a process of chemical transformation for millennia. As they carefully brush away the soil and eye the piece with curiosity, as they look into €aguar’s eyes and a deep sense of safety washes over them.
S Sanchez’s piece is fundamentally about time: nonlinear, layered, and alive. Drawing from ancestral symbols while projecting forward, Double €aguar Rattle functions as evidence—proof of existence across eras. To make an artifact, as Sanchez has done, is not only to imagine the future, but to actively shape it. For queer and trans people of color, whose lives are so often rendered precarious or erased, this is a radical act.
The €aguar presents as a powerful representation of queerness and transness—protector, witness, and communicator across temporal boundaries. A noise maker, the rattle speaks in a time when queer voices are continually threatened with silence; its sound insists on presence. The jaguar, a symbol of strength and guardianship, holds space across past, present, and future, asserting: we have always been here, and we will always be here.
Sanchez’s work collapses time, reaching backward and forward simultaneously, pulling the viewer into a continuum where ancestry and futurity coexist.”
-Naomi
