SIMONE JOHN

Simone John is a fabulist archivist who builds family museums. Her creative platform Motherwit organizes itself around one question: what counts as knowing your own people? Answers emerge through oral history, visual art, poetry, graphic memoir, community gatherings, and a press. The work surfaces what's been dispersed and speculates toward what the record refused to hold.

Her debut collection Testify (Octopus Books, 2017) was one way of knowing. The work she makes now is another. She holds an MFA from Goddard College, received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, and is a 2026 Gardner Museum Neighborhood Salon Luminary.

​

​

image: Tarik Bartel