From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

The dope art dealer

Her art is called "dope" for a reason … 'cause you're stupid not to take notice.

by Colleen Dougher

January 24 2007

At just about any art show in South Florida, Jacquelyn Jackson Johnston can be found lurking in her signature wife-beater, jeans and black fedora, which she pulls low over her eyes. She'll often be accompanied by Bruno, a 98-pound Doberman pinscher she describes as "a ladies' man" and sometimes identifies as Beybi Boi. The woman doesn't cut the most approachable figure, but anyone who can work up the nerve to address her will be acknowledged in the following manner: Johnston will stand in close, introduce herself as Jacqi Brown, "the dope art dealer," and fire off a barrage of questions. "Do you like artwork?" she'll ask. "Do you own any artwork? Why don't you own any artwork?" She'll then proffer a small plastic baggie containing a piece of painted canvas, a minute drawing on paper or still-smaller baggies containing tiny business cards and ask for $5 in return.

"People might respond that [art] is too big, too expensive, too this, too that," Johnston says. "No matter what the 'too' is, [dope art] isn't, so I bust it out and try to sell it from that angle. I've also sold it under the pretense that it had my phone number on it, like, if men were trying to pick me up, I would be like, 'Well, it's in here. This is the answer -- it's five bucks.' "

Johnston created the Brown persona in an attempt to promote not only her own artwork but also that of artists she displays at her Faktura Gallery in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood. Brown allows Johnston to feel more comfortable in social situations that would otherwise leave the naturally shy, 24-year-old painter feeling awkward.

Although she was born in Tennessee, Johnston grew up in Chile, where she'd moved with her mother after her stepfather got a job there. She didn't fit in with the Chilean kids and continued to feel like an outsider when she returned to the United States at age 16 to attend an art school in Massachusetts.

"I couldn't relate to these people at all, and it was terrible," she recalls, sitting at a kitchen table inside her mother's Pompano Beach home. "I was like, 'Who is Jerry Springer?' I couldn't use my phone for two weeks because no one would tell me what the pound button was. They all thought I was kidding and the little voice kept saying, 'Please press the pound button after you enter your password. I'm like, 'What's a pound button?' "

To further complicate matters, Johnston didn't smoke. So while her peers were sneaking off campus for cigarette breaks, she'd stand alone outside the school. "[In Miami], it was the same nightmare all over again," she recalls, "only everybody was doing drugs."

But as Brown, Johnston is able to tailor this nightmare to meet her own ends. "If everybody's blowing coke off the table and I bust out dope art, it doesn't really matter because they're all like, 'Whoa, that's so cool,' " she explains. "Then, I'm in the back door and people are like, 'Whoa, is that acid? Can I put it on my tongue?' I've had people eat [the art] in front of me."

Johnston knows when to let Brown take over. "Jacqi Brown lies, and she can sneak her way into clubs and get free drinks and get underage people in," she explains. "Whatever it is that needs to happen, she can make it happen. And I'm just standing there and in my head going, 'Did I just say that?' "

If anybody needs another identity to help her out, it's Johnston, who is becoming one of the hardest-working women in the Miami art scene. Since opening in April 2005, Faktura Gallery has hosted a dozen shows, including Here I Sit, in which artists turned toilet seats into art, and M Is for Miami, an exhibition of Johnston's oil paintings and Christian Alexander's large-scale, silk-screens on canvas. Johnston also runs Faktura Projekts (Fakturaprojekts.com), a nonprofit organization that includes a canine-rescue effort and an annual homeless benefit called Pimp My Kart, in which artists transform shopping carts into rolling artworks during Art Basel.

A typical day may find Johnson stuffing tiny works of art into baggies, bathing mangy dogs or finding art-world jobs for graffiti artists. In between, she may plan shows, rush sick puppies to the animal hospital or paint, sometimes for as long as 18 hours. "When I paint, I will generally take chips and salsa, a six-pack and a pillow," she says. "I paint large, and I like to paint wet on wet, so it works best if I paint for long periods of time."

Two years ago, when Johnston first began renting the 1,800-square-foot warehouse that now houses the gallery, the property was riddled with stolen cars in which she would find people sleeping, stacked automobile parts and one horrific bathroom. "Trainspotting wouldn't have been filmed there," she says, "and none of the fixtures were attached."

After Johnston's father took one look at her gallery and the surrounding neighborhood, he returned to Tennessee and drove back with Phluffy, a Doberman puppy Johnston describes as "the biggest, meanest, hugest, blackest thing you've ever seen." Despite Phluffy's intimidating presence, stray dogs began arriving at the house Johnston and two other artists were renting three blocks from the gallery. "Literally the first night we were there," Johnston recalls, "a little, black-and-white, longhaired Jack Russell terrier ran in the gate. He was covered in ticks. He was playing with a huge Doberman and a rottweiler and just bouncing off of them. … He was a holy terror. I didn't think he would ever get adopted."

Yet this terrier became the first of the 39 dogs for which the Faktura Pet Projekt has found homes. "I didn't have a choice," Johnston says of her dog-adoption service. "It's like, c'mon, they come up to you and ask for help. What are you going to do? Say no?"

When Johnston arrived in South Florida after graduating from Barnard College at Columbia University in New York with a double major in visual arts and art history, she spent two months as a resident artist at Objex Artspace, a now-defunct gallery in the Wynwood Art District. "When I left Objex, a lot of people were acting very supportive," Johnston says. "I guess they thought I would be able to pull off a space equally as nice [as Objex], which isn't true."

Faktura, Johnston adds, is "a nasty warehouse that smells like dogs. Take it for what it is. Come in for the artwork. Come in for me. It's not track lighting and pretty floors. It's cinder blocks and cement. Let's call a dog a dog."

Some people call it just that. Onajidé Shabaka, the editor of the Miami Art Exchange Web site, Miamiartexchange.com, offers no kind words for Johnston's space, noting in a blog he posted last July that "having dogs loose in the gallery/warehouse and doing what dogs do, and smelling the aftereffects plus the stench of wet dogs is not a very pleasant environment for a gallery."

Shabaka is no great fan of Johnston's dope art concept, either. "[It's] kind of offensive until you really see what it is," he argues in a phone interview. "And then, it's kind of, 'Oh, OK -- next.' It's just another marketing thing, and that's all it is. It's just another way for her to get her name in City Link or wherever else."

But a 26-year-old Cutler Ridge artist who calls himself AHOLSNIFFSGLUE defends the gallery and Johnston's devotion to it. "The place is in a rugged part of town, and it's a dope place in my opinion," he says. "There can be a bit of a dog smell at times, but people know what's up when they get there."

Johnston, however, appears to dismiss any criticism of the less-than-Wynwood-worthy quality of her gallery, choosing instead to focus on the artwork displayed within it. "What I really care about is making artwork that's pertinent to wherever I am," she explains, "artwork that participates with the audience, that is a commentary, that reveals something about the way we're living our lives right now."

To that end, she is working on a community-oriented project intended to preserve an ethnic character that she says is disappearing from some Miami neighborhoods. "In Wynwood, the Design District, Little Haiti and Liberty City, they're starting to put a lot of money into renovating old storefronts," Johnston notes, adding that the familiar hand-painted signs advertising goods such as cigarette packs and soda cans are getting destroyed in the process. So she is photographing doomed signs and storefronts and transforming them into classical oil paintings she hopes to have exhibited in the new buildings.

Such projects have caught the attention of Brook Dorsch, the owner of Miami's Dorsch Gallery. Whether it's a dog or a neighborhood identity, "when she sees a stray, she sees a need for something to happen and that the current services aren't good enough," he says of Johnston. "And she's going to do something about it."

Dorsch is particularly fond of Jacqi Brown and her dope art. "When I first moved to Wynwood, you'd just see the little baggies lying all over the street," he recalls. "Now, I see the baggies, and I look to see if there's any art in them."

South Florida residents can expect to encounter Johnston's art-filled baggies for some time, as Brown has become as much a part of the artist's life as stray dogs, pimped-out shopping carts and less-than-supportive art critics.

"After a while, your frustration level gets to a point where your personality has to go somewhere else," she argues. "So for me, it's been really comforting to make up my own best friend and play her when I go out."