When remembering her childhood in Englewood, photographer and social justice artist Tonika Lewis Johnson doesn’t first think about the disinvestment or harmful narratives often attached to the South Side neighborhood. She fondly remembers the block of West 62nd Street and South Loomis Boulevard as a close-knit and community-centered environment where she met her first friends.
As early as 10 years old, however, Johnson said she began noticing a disconnect between the love and pride she felt for Englewood and the negative reactions she’d received whenever she told people she‘s from there. Those interactions shaped her desire to become the visual storyteller she is today, one whose work has evolved from documenting inequality in some of Chicago’s poorest communities through The Folded Map Project to actively repairing the damage it caused Black families.
“The bulk of my observations came from my commute from Englewood to Lane Tech,” Johnson said about her daily 14-mile trip to and from the North Side for high school. “When you are meeting people who don’t know much about your neighborhood, or have not lived around Black people, and you all start to ask each other questions, it helps you — as a Black person from the South Side — be able to articulate your own culture in a way that you maybe haven’t had to explain before.”
Johnson stopped by The TRiiBE Studio on Chicago’s West Side to talk about her latest project, UnBlocked Englewood, an arts-driven beautification project providing home repairs on blocks directly impacted by predatory housing practices of the 1950s and ‘60s. She first garnered national recognition in 2017 with The Folded Map Project, which visually connected segregated North and South side residents who shared the same address but different lived experiences, and in 2021 with Inequity For Sale; a live art installation where she placed landmarks outside of Englewood homes sold on racist Land Sale Contracts. Both socially-engaged projects made privileged Chicagoans and institutions grapple with the realities of systemic racism, disinvestment, and housing inequity.
Awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “Genius Grant,” in 2025, Johnson is now focused full-time on UnBlocked Englewood. The award came with $800,000 in unrestricted funding distributed over five years, which gives her the financial freedom to be selective about the jobs she takes.
“It feels, in a strange way, very validating,” Johnson said about the Genius Grant, “because so much of my work is about demonstrating not only the beauty, but the resilience, the innovation, the intellect that already exists in my home neighborhood and other neighborhoods that are in Chicago and Black and disinvested in. We have a built-in knowledge because of the way in which we have to navigate all this disinvestment that makes us have a different and innovative perspective on the city and even have solutions for a lot of the problems.”
UnBlocked Englewood is Johnson’s innovative idea to help solve years of disinvestment on the 6500 block of South Aberdeen Street — less than a mile away from where she grew up. Johnson has raised more than $2 million that will serve as a reparative investment for residents there. None of the money is coming from Johnson herself; the bulk of it has come from GoFundMe donations, independent investors, institutions like Sustain Our Future Foundation and Terra Foundation for American Art; and grants such as the city of Chicago’s Creative Place Making. The latter grant gave Johnson’s project its first $250,000 in 2022.
Although the city’s Creative Place Making grant is for making public art, not home repair or block beautification, Johnson argued that, “When homes are beautiful, it is public art.”
“Even if I were to put [my] money into it, it would have taken away from the conceptual impact, which is [that] there are institutions that should be invested in helping this block heal,” Johnson said. Her body of work is centered on helping address the racial wealth gap while encouraging artists to create projects that confront and illuminate difficult histories.
“You all should also invest in an artist wanting to heal some of the harms that you want us to create work around,” Johnson said about the powers that be, a.k.a. any art institution that exhibits artwork capturing the Black struggle.
Switching from a creative hat to fundraising for UnBlocked Englewood wasn’t easy, though. “The biggest barrier was learning how to ask for money,” Johnson said. “I had to stretch myself to become a fundraiser — to look people in the eye and say, ‘Can you fund $250,000? Can you do $500,000 over two years? Can you do a million?’”
According to Johnson, 15 homes on the block — that she knows of — were affected by predatory Land Sale Contracts. Those homes were included in her Inequity for Sale project. However, there are 24 homes on the 6500 block of South Aberdeen Street in total. Through UnBlocked Englewood, Johnson — with the Chicago Bungalow Association making all the repairs — has restored 18 of them so far.
Through UnBlocked Englewood, residents have received new roofs, back porches, furnaces, plumbing, and updated electrical. And the block itself has been transformed through murals, sculptures, and other public art installations. Johnson said she had to work to earn the trust of each resident she helped. “What it took was us immediately doing the work. And so after you repair three homes, they’re like, ‘OK, alright, OK, we’ll give you a chance to do some more,’” she said.
Additionally, there were about 20 vacant lots on the block when Johnson’s project began. Through UnBlocked Englewood, Johnson has acquired six of them; “five we have deeded over to the residents so that they can own it, because they’ve been taking care of it,” she said. Right now, Johnson’s in the process of closing on a couple more vacant lots. Out of the vacant lots in her possession, the residents have agreed to build two new homes to sell to young Black families — for no profit.
“We don’t have to wait on policy. We don’t have to wait on a president. We don’t have to wait on reparations, and we haven’t,” Johnson said. “Because of this project, especially since it’s been going on for a few years, we can now say that these specific types of homes need this amount of money to do these specific repairs — repairs that the majority of people in Black disinvested neighborhoods need help to do. So after this project is complete, we can say, ‘Oh, if you want to actually help stabilize one block, you need this amount of money.’”
Johnson’s goal is to stabilize the block in a way that residents can take care of things on their own. UnBlocked Englewood is a culmination of her life’s work, and what seems like a third installment in her evolving story about Black Chicago, one that began with documenting inequity and has now shifted toward reparation.
Her work will be celebrated at her first solo exhibit in the city at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. It’s scheduled for fall 2027.
“In the next three years, success looks like having a few new young Black families on the block, and a block that’s preserved so people are not displaced,” she said.
Together, the MacArthur Fellowship and UnBlocked Englewood have solidified Johnson’s purpose. Both are pushing her to think more deeply about financial planning; she had to get a certi fied professional accountant just to prepare for receiving a larger influx of money from the Genius Grant. Most importantly, both are deepening the way she thinks about reparations, not just as a monetary figure, but as a long-term community solution.
“It doesn’t matter what amount they gave us, collectively or individually, it’s never going to cover the trauma and the loss,” Johnson said. “Monetary support is important, but it’s really about what you do with it, and how informed you are when making decisions about how to use it.”
