At 77, Poppy Johnson has discovered something about making art that eluded her at 17: She cares a lot less what anybody thinks.

That doesn’t make confronting a blank canvas any easier.

“Every time you look at a blank piece of paper or a blank canvas, you’re faced with the same incredible problem,” Johnson said Friday night, surrounded by decades of her work at Floyd Memorial Library in Greenport. “What do you do? What do you do that’s worth doing?”

The difference now is what happens after she starts.

“I think I was strangled a lot in my youth by self-consciousness and worry,” Johnson said. “Are people going to like it? … I don’t really feel that way so much anymore.”

She paused.

“I feel free.”

It’s an intriguing admission from an artist who, by most conventional measures, appeared pretty fearless in her youth.

‘Very interesting times’

Johnson grew up in Greenwich Village with the New York art world practically outside her door. Her parents, she recalled, drank with Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning at the Cedar Tavern. She always wanted to be an artist, but proved less interested in acquiring the traditional credentials for becoming one.

She attended Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, dropping out of both. What was happening outside the classroom seemed far more urgent.

The Vietnam War was raging. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Protest movements were filling the streets, while young artists were challenging museums and galleries over everything from the war to racism and the treatment and representation of artists.

Johnson became involved with the Art Workers’ Coalition and the Guerrilla Art Action Group and participated in performance art, political demonstrations and happenings — work that, as she puts it, couldn’t necessarily be hung on a wall.

“We were living through very interesting times,” Johnson said. “It wasn’t a time where I felt like it was a good idea to just be safely in a little school.”

“We all wanted to change the world.”

More than half a century later, Johnson is still making art, but the scale of the ambition — and perhaps her understanding of change itself — has evolved.

“When you live a long time, you just realize that things are not going to change immediately,” she said. “What you need to do is just think about things that you can have some kind of control over, or that you can do.”

‘The process is what interests me’

Her solo exhibition at Floyd, “Introspective,” brings together work from across that long career, including drawings, watercolor, monoprint, assemblage and more recent pieces Johnson calls “museums.”

But Johnson is emphatic about one thing: This isn’t a retrospective. She’s not finished. Lately, Johnson has been trying to relearn how to paint, a medium she largely abandoned years ago.

“There’s something about … a flat surface and just paint instead of trying to deal with all sorts of gluing and wiring and doing all the things that are hard to do,” Johnson said.

Then she laughed at the premise.

“I think painting should be easy,” she said. “It’s just that one reason I haven’t done a lot of painting is because sometimes I think it’s very boring.”

For Johnson, the satisfaction has never necessarily been in the finished product.

“The process is what’s interesting to me,” she said.

Johnson has long worked with found objects — feathers, shells, rocks, bones, discarded musical instruments and wooden letters among them. One work in the Floyd exhibition, “Martha’s Violin,” incorporates the actual violin once owned by Johnson’s mother.

Guests at a reception for Poppy Johnson’s new exhibit, ‘Introspective’, at Floyd Memorial Libary on Friday evening. Credit: Chris Francescani

The instrument had passed around the family and been played by some of Johnson’s grandchildren before eventually falling out of use. Johnson decided “it needed another life.”

She combined it with an earlier artwork made from the neck of a guitar and eventually added wings from a dead bird she and her daughter found while walking on a local beach.

Other recent works begin with old wooden printer’s type drawers. Johnson fills their tiny compartments with objects, creating what she calls “museums.” She imagines shrinking to the size of a bumblebee and entering each compartment as though it were a room containing a monumental artwork.

The idea has led somewhere else.

Johnson has photographed sections of the tiny museums and enlarged them, experimenting with what happens when something miniature becomes big. Now she’s considering enlarging them further — perhaps even painting them.

‘Libraries are about sharing’

There is another reason Floyd is a particularly fitting place for Johnson to be working through her past and future.

She started at the library in 1986 as a part-time clerk and went on to become a children’s librarian, youth librarian, archivist, reference librarian and ultimately assistant director. Along the way, the self-described “serial dropout” finally returned to school, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

She also curated art exhibitions at Floyd, providing wall space for local artists in a region where, she said, there weren’t enough places for them to show their work. Johnson retired during the COVID pandemic without a retirement party. Coming back with a solo exhibition, she said, feels a little like the celebration she never had.

For years, Floyd was her “home away from home,” but Johnson sees a deeper connection between the library and the political ideals of the young artist who once wanted to change the world.

Libraries, she said, embody the idea that “things are free, everybody’s welcome, everybody’s helping everybody.”

“Libraries are about sharing,” Johnson said.

Sally Grant, an art historian who succeeded Johnson as coordinator of Floyd’s exhibitions, describes herself as “walking in Poppy’s footsteps.”

Grant said people at Friday’s reception recalled Johnson not just as an artist, but as the children’s librarian they remembered from years earlier. One woman reminisced about bringing her young daughter to see Johnson at the library.

“So many people have stories like that about Poppy,” Grant said. “She’s been so important to so many people as a librarian.”

Grant sees Johnson’s exhibition as simultaneously looking backward and forward. She also sees something in the work that seems increasingly scarce: an invitation to stop. In a world of screens, distractions and people constantly rushing from one thing to another, Grant said Johnson’s work attempts to “stop the viewer’s eye” and create a moment of pause.

Johnson, meanwhile, is moving on.

There are more experiments she wants to try with her miniature museums. There are canvases waiting for her. There is painting to relearn.

And the blank surface still presents the same problem it did when she was 17.