Christopher Johns was born in Racine, Wisconsin. In 1975 he was awarded a BFA degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and, in 1977, a MFA degree in painting from Stanford University. After graduate school Johns moved to New York City and established a studio on Tenth Avenue. In 1979 he as offered a position at Louisiana State University teaching painting and drawing. Johns is currently a Professor in the painting and drawing program of the LSU School of Art.
Johns has shown his work throughout the United States, his first solo exhibition was at the Bienville Gallery in New Orleans in 1980. Since then his work has been included in many group and solo exhibitions. Notable group exhibitions include Southern Abstraction (1989) curated by Peter Frank and Abstraction in Louisiana (1980) curated by Terrington Calas. His work has been seen at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, the Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City, the Peltz Gallery in Milwaukee and at LA Art Core in Los Angeles. He is currently represented by the Sylvia Schmidt Gallery in New Orleans and by the Perimeter Gallery in Chicago. His work can be found in several public collections. These include the Charles Wustum Museum of Art in Racine, Wisconsin, Continental Bank in Chicago, and Premier Bancorp in Baton Rouge.
In 1999 he was an artist in residence at the David and Julia White Artists Colony in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica. He has also been a resident fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. In 1986 he was awarded a summer research grant from Louisiana State University in that same year he was also awarded a Visual Artists’ Fellowship from the State of Louisiana, Division of the Arts. He received a Visual Artists’ Fellowship from the Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts in 1988.