In a gallery room at Off-Site Art Space sits a floor loom that was programmed by deceased textile artist Becky Johnson. Anyone is welcome to take Johnson’s seat, pick up her shuttle and contribute to a communal weaving utilizing scraps from her studio.

“Just the fact that people were creating a piece of cloth, as she would say — all these different people are just grabbing strands, there’s a table full of fibers, and you can take whatever you want,” said Andrew Gottsfield, Johnson’s husband. “You can write a note on it, whatever, put it in there, and it’s in this piece of cloth. And I think she would love that more than anything.”

Johnson died in September 2025 due to an aggressive bladder cancer. She was 47. She had completed her second of three years as an MFA student studying textiles in the Department of Visual Art at The University of Kansas.

A sampling of her vast oeuvre is on display at Off-Site Art Space now through Saturday, Jan. 31. A closing reception will tie off the exhibition’s gallery tenure from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, Jan 30.

Johnson’s weavings and feltwork fully utilize the gallery’s space, consuming two rooms with earthy tones and fibrous textures. 

Merry Sun, co-curator of the show, KU lecturer and director of exhibitions at Off-Site, said the exhibition’s first room evokes the feeling of walking into an artist’s studio. Adjacent to the standing loom is a semicircle of felt rising from the ground and blanketing the wall like a writhing sunset.

The second room of the gallery hosts experimental weavings, including materials dangling from wooden frames and the ceiling. Johnson tucked textile materials like felt into pockets studded along these pieces.

“They feel like they’ve been alive for thousands of years,” Sun said of the work.

Mary Anne Jordan is a professor of visual art in textiles at KU. She said she worked with Johnson almost daily.

“Becky had a really broad practice,” Jordan said. “She did a lot of textile processes. I think her main interest was weaving and felting. She did a lot of natural dye work, and … in her personal life, she was a gardener and growing plants for dye.”

Johnson created all of the work at Off-Site over a brief year and a half period in grad school, plus around 20 more pieces that aren’t on display.

Gottsfield said Johnson was “a force of nature,” prolific even as she balanced raising two sons, spending time with her family and teaching at KU alongside her personal practice.

“Even when we sit down, she’d be drawing, painting, just always making something,” he said.

According to Gottsfield, Johnson grew up on farmland in central Minnesota, near Clearwater. She lived in Boston and Oakland, California — where she met Gottsfield — before settling in a farmhouse just outside of Lawrence in 2006. Shortly after, they had their first child.

Johnson’s practice at KU honed in on textiles at a nearly molecular level, but she started her career studying cloth’s end product: fashion merchandising. While in California, she moved to studying textile design at San Francisco State University and designed patterns for upscale sleepwear. 

Before KU, Gottsfield said that Johnson’s work was mostly utilitarian, creating blankets and scarves. Once their children grew older and more self-sufficient, Johnson decided to sate her craving for more conceptual work in academia. She was accepted at KU with a full-ride scholarship.

Jordan said that as they cleaned out her studio after her death, they found the phrase “Everything a body of work” echoed throughout sketchbooks and notes on index cards, giving the exhibition its name.

“It refers not just to the body of work as an artist, but even the representation of a body in the work,” Jordan said. “She used a lot of anthropological references to women.”

Gottsfield described a recurring female form that materialized across Johnson’s creations: “The arms are outstretched in the air, and the hair is getting blown to one side, and it kind of looks like—it’s not distress, but excitement, or just some sort of energy happening.”

He said this was one of the first recurring motifs that sprouted in Johnson’s grad school work. It was born from her research on prairie madness, a phenomenon wherein settlers would move to the rural prairie in the 19th century and, left isolated at home often with children, women would experience severe depression and sometimes mental breakdowns. 

Gottsfield said that, while Johnson had a deep love for her children, she could also identify with the idea of prairie madness, having moved from a city to a rural area without nearby family and limited resources. 

“And I think later, as she was developing stuff, that kind of figure, that form came up, and she started weaving it,” he said.

She was also fascinated by Venus figures, statuettes that are tens of thousands of years old depicting full-figured bodies with breasts. Johnson found that many interpretations of the figures were from 20th-century men who projected their “patriarchal thinking onto art,” thus influencing interpretations of the figures for decades to come, according to Gottsfield. 

He said Johnson was a meticulous researcher and voracious reader, and as she delved into prairie settlement, cave paintings and early human occupation, she filtered imagery and ideas through her personalized settings on her loom.

The resulting work at Off-Site reaches a hand across time and space to unearth ideas of womanhood and deconstructing patriarchy.

“She was just exploring those ideas, and how much influence the patriarchy, if you will, has influenced our thought on everything and how we see everything,” he said. “And I think from that, her main focus was to kind of break down those patriarchal structures, to reimagine art and even pieces that have already existed and been interpreted.”

Jordan said that Johnson showed the same nurturing humanism in the studio and classroom, where she supported her cohort members and helped her students grow as artists.

According to Gottsfield, Johnson was apprehensive about teaching when she was first accepted into the program at KU.

“And that was the part she may have loved the most,” he said. “When she got down to it, she realized she really loved teaching, and she really loved her students.”

Jordan said her students loved her, too. Two of Johnson’s former students, Maya Sabatini and Emily Bell, will give weaving performances at the closing reception Friday.

“The students are the ones that decided they wanted to have the loom there so that they could demonstrate so, basically, that they could teach something that she taught them,” Jordan said.

The exhibition is co-curated by Sun, as well as Cassandra Liuzzo and Ashleigh Robek, MFA candidates in the Textiles and Fibers department. Liuzzo and Robek also helped animate Johnson’s work, each completing one unfinished piece using Johnson’s sketches, mockups and parchment overlays.

The weaving that the community creates on the standing loom will go to Johnson’s family when the exhibition ends.

Off-Site Art Space is open from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday at 924 Delaware St.

Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.

Read their complete bio here. Read their work for the Times here.

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