Johnetta is a long-time Boston resident who graduated from Texas Southern University, Houston TX, with a Bachelor of Education degree and from Boston University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Art Education. Tinker’s work has been shown in numerous art exhibits and traveling exhibitions throughout the U.S. and abroad. Tinker has painted murals in Houston and Boston and designed interactive exhibits with the Boston Children’s Museum, Boston Black Exhibition, and coordinated several mural art projects with neighborhood community centers in the Boston area. She illustrated brochures and books. She has participated in several artist-in-residency and art exchange programs including the Indian Arts Institute Museum, Santa Fe, NM, the Massachusetts Guangdong China Art Exchange, and Artpark, Lewiston, NY.

Susan is a textile, fiber and mixed media artist who lives and works primarily in the Greater Boston area. At Hunter College of the City of New York, she became interested in African American History and the visual arts. Her concern for the development of mutually supportive relationships between African American artists and their communities led her to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was a Research Associate in the Community Fellows Program. Ms. Thompson has exhibited widely in Massachusetts and other parts of the United States. She has participated in cultural exchanges in Haiti, Cuba, People’s Republic of China, Japan and with Native American artists in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Her work reflects the diverse cultural influences that she has encountered in her travels abroad and in her own cultural heritage. Through fabric, she creates unique designs, which sometimes tell stories that communicate the struggle and soul of her people.

Susan has created public art for the MBTA Orange Line, the Parks Department, the Harriet Tubman House, the Afro-American Museum, schools and other organizations. She is currently an artist-in-residence in the African American Master Artist in Residence Program at Northeastern University. She retired from the Artful Adventures Program at the Museum of Fine Arts in 2016 and the same year was awarded a Creative Entrepreneur Fellowship. She has been a consultant for the Gardner Museum, the Children’s Museum and the Boston Aquarium. She currently teaches at Paige Academy. Susan Thompson feels passionately that her own craft as well as those of others should be celebrated and passed down to future generations.