have fun. move forward.
Significant Developments is a work of art inviting us to slow down and spend time being curious and playful about the relationships we hold when we are working together. As the Principle Artist for SD, I employ the maxim, “The slower we go, the faster we’ll get there.” Urgency and unexamined habits often lead to low-information communication patterns, a blurring of roles and agency, and a defaulting to existing models over innovation. Our team aims to listen deeply to the stories of a people throughout a system, facilitate the sharing of personal and work-related stories with each other, and extend those stories together into a future we collectively imagine through practical small-scale shifts and new agreements and processes supporting a long-term vision.
At a practical level, Significant Developments assists businesses and organizations to identify assets, build capacity, and advance on their strategic goals. Whether in weekend retreats, community engagement works, or developing comprehensive strategic plans, our team crafts exercises and experiences unique to your group to highlight the depth of wisdom already present and align our steps on a common path.
Why call it art? Significant Developments centers cultural expression as the primary way we form individual and collective identity and the most powerful tool for forming affinity and focusing our shared efforts toward practical impacts. Art brings people together. Art disrupts preconceived notions. Our work is art work.
daniel johnson
principal artist
danieljohnsonmakesart.com
At a practical level, Significant Developments assists businesses and organizations to identify assets, build capacity, and advance on their strategic goals. Whether in weekend retreats, community engagement works, or developing comprehensive strategic plans, our team crafts exercises and experiences unique to your group to highlight the depth of wisdom already present and align our steps on a common path.
Why call it art? Significant Developments centers cultural expression as the primary way we form individual and collective identity and the most powerful tool for forming affinity and focusing our shared efforts toward practical impacts. Art brings people together. Art disrupts preconceived notions. Our work is art work.
daniel johnson
principal artist
danieljohnsonmakesart.com
Change Agents
All projects begin with our Principle Artist and Change Agent teams are assembled based on the needs and scale of the project.
Ava Jeanne Davis is an artist from Jackson, MS and Washington D.C. She explores themes of heritage, love, and human connectedness through her paintings as well as all other areas of her life. Ava Jeanne is a recent graduate from Tulane University who lives as a professional artist while continuing her graduate studies in Social Work at Jackson State University and working toward a better future in her community nearby and globally.
Monica “Surreal the Messenger” Atkins is an organizer, cultural worker, and facilitator who magnifies the work of grassroots communities, organizers, cultural workers, and social justice organizations by building strategies that center culture, community, capital, and creation.
The Chicago native and 18-year resident of Jackson, MS has worked with labor unions, youth & grassroots communities, and climate/environmental justice organizations to develop strategic plans, organize campaigns, and strengthen partnerships with culture at the center of these strategies. Monica is a co-founder of Deep Seedz Arts Collective and serves on the Board of Directors for Black Girls Shred.
Lucie Wren Cooper is a painter, musician, and glass artist. Having been raised by artists in Jackson, MS, she has a deep appreciation for southern makers and stories passed down through generations. Her work explores themes of nostalgia through colorful, surrealist landscapes and poems set to reverb drenched guitar loops.
Kira Cummings is a multi-medium artist adept in painting, pyrography, photography, videography, graphic design, and animation. A Fine Art graduate of Jackson State University with a Minor in Graphic Design, Cummings holds a membership in the Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi for pyrography. Cummings is the Creative Director for The Works where she creates video and animation for musicians, interview programs, and corporate promotions as well as producing live events.
Born in Champaign-Urbana Illinois, Shamb’e Jones grew up in a family full of artists; musicians, seamstresses, carpenters, farmers, and more. Inspired by music and nature, he earned a BFA from Jackson State University where he participated in a study abroad program in Côte d'Ivoire, Africa, spending a summer studying various forms of craftwork. In the studio, music guides the process of how his vision and the materials communicate with each other.
Wendy Eddleman-Cooper is a multidisciplinary artist. Her dreamlike and imaginative personal narrative paintings, prints, and stained-glass pieces can be found in collections within Mississippi and beyond. A native of Jackson, MS, Wendy studied with the APAC Visual Art program before studying printmaking, drawing, and 3D arts at the University of Southern Mississippi. Edelman-Cooper assisted Bebe Wolfe and her creative team for 20 years at Wolfe Studio in jackson and now is a studio artist and craftsman at Pearl River Glass Studio.
Monique Davis is Director of the Center for Art and Public Exchange (CAPE) and Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer at the Mississippi Museum of Art. CAPE uses artwork, exhibitions, artist engagements, and programming as a vehicle to have conversations about race and equity. Monique creates human-centered spaces that expand visitor's perspectives and reveal our shared humanity. Monique is a CPA, Howard University graduate, and Washington DC-native living in Jackson, Mississippi.
“A project like this allows johnson and the Utica community to stretch the traditional understanding of what people label as art—describing the acts of bringing people together and building trust, forming relationships and broadening the sense of belonging people feel in elements of shared culture as an art itself.
‘You look at the Civil Rights Movement and the role of singing, distinctly the role local southern singers played; I mean social movement is really predicated on shared cultural touchstones, and that’s really part of what we’re working on this year,’ johnson said. ‘How are we bringing the community into this? How are we creating the invitation, the entry points?’”
– Aliyah Veal, Utica Locals Tackle Food Desert Woes With ‘Homegrown’ Festival, November 15, 2023
“Artists always deal with the seemingly impossible: the impossibility of changing a person’s perception, point of view, mindset, ethics. But the horizon line for daniel wasn’t drawn by any of these concerns. It was always drawn by the prospect of him being someone who, years from now, people might greet in the street and say, ‘I remember when you came to our town and the Museum came with you.’”
– Seph Rodney, Compassion, Art, People, and Equity: The Story of the Center for Art and Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Summer 2021
“daniel johnson and his team at Significant Developments LLC performed the role of strategic planning consultants but did so in a way that helped JMMF staff recognize that they themselves are artists and culture bearers, and had unique and valuable insights about the community and how to best engage them...[Executive Director Primus] Wheeler noted that ‘[In the past,] We were saving the community from itself. And so, because [daniel] guided our civic engagement process, we’re thinking now that when we come to the table, we could actually be confident that we’re going to work together with the community to get something done.’
– PolicyLink, Moving from Engaging to Organizing with Arts and Culture Strategies October 2020
He’d proposed to dig up clay in different areas of Lafayette County, and make coins from it to see how currency flows through markets and how value rises in exchanges among people. It was an admittedly amorphous aim but, turns out, a cool metaphor for the soft, malleable start that was molded and hardened into something more lasting and durable. Community conversations started with the usual arts and culture leaders, then branched out and went deeper and wider, to people working with civil rights, with farming, with the broader local community...“The center of gravity [in the conversations] seemed to be the relationship between land and power,” johnson said. The clay coins, each a piece of someone’s land and the story behind it, became a sort of currency of conversation — a token of appreciation as each contact gave their time and attention.
– Mississippi Today, ‘Land & Power’ summit creates ‘magical’ community connection through social practice art December 29, 2019
‘You look at the Civil Rights Movement and the role of singing, distinctly the role local southern singers played; I mean social movement is really predicated on shared cultural touchstones, and that’s really part of what we’re working on this year,’ johnson said. ‘How are we bringing the community into this? How are we creating the invitation, the entry points?’”
– Aliyah Veal, Utica Locals Tackle Food Desert Woes With ‘Homegrown’ Festival, November 15, 2023
“Artists always deal with the seemingly impossible: the impossibility of changing a person’s perception, point of view, mindset, ethics. But the horizon line for daniel wasn’t drawn by any of these concerns. It was always drawn by the prospect of him being someone who, years from now, people might greet in the street and say, ‘I remember when you came to our town and the Museum came with you.’”
– Seph Rodney, Compassion, Art, People, and Equity: The Story of the Center for Art and Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Summer 2021
“daniel johnson and his team at Significant Developments LLC performed the role of strategic planning consultants but did so in a way that helped JMMF staff recognize that they themselves are artists and culture bearers, and had unique and valuable insights about the community and how to best engage them...[Executive Director Primus] Wheeler noted that ‘[In the past,] We were saving the community from itself. And so, because [daniel] guided our civic engagement process, we’re thinking now that when we come to the table, we could actually be confident that we’re going to work together with the community to get something done.’
– PolicyLink, Moving from Engaging to Organizing with Arts and Culture Strategies October 2020
He’d proposed to dig up clay in different areas of Lafayette County, and make coins from it to see how currency flows through markets and how value rises in exchanges among people. It was an admittedly amorphous aim but, turns out, a cool metaphor for the soft, malleable start that was molded and hardened into something more lasting and durable. Community conversations started with the usual arts and culture leaders, then branched out and went deeper and wider, to people working with civil rights, with farming, with the broader local community...“The center of gravity [in the conversations] seemed to be the relationship between land and power,” johnson said. The clay coins, each a piece of someone’s land and the story behind it, became a sort of currency of conversation — a token of appreciation as each contact gave their time and attention.
– Mississippi Today, ‘Land & Power’ summit creates ‘magical’ community connection through social practice art December 29, 2019
“A key population for Significant Developments were staff from the maintenance, environmental services, and security teams who often lived within close proximity of the mall, and were in the best position to reveal the connections between the community and the institution. The artist team conducted interviews, facilitated conversations, and engaged in arts-making activities with staff, which informed a strategic cultural plan to inform future creative placemaking activities in and around the mall, and authorized staff to permanently uphold arts and cultural work.
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– communitydevelopment.art, PolicyLink research portal for Art Place America Community Development Investments, 2022
“Joeseph Miller, 10, sitting cross-legged on a blanket inside Core Sample, looked up and took in the bells all around, their patterns, symbols and interaction. ‘I like the decorations on them, and the way they’re set up. When you touch one, it pushes more,’ and a sort of music results.
‘I think these are handcrafted and that kids might’ve done them,’ surmised Malachi Reese Knight, 11.
‘Like everything else in the city, you have to engage and participate in order to be effective,’ observed Dorothy Triplett, who’d wandered by Core Sample for a closer look. She fingered a few bells, savoring their sound. ‘And the more people you have, the more beautiful the music.’”
– Hattiesburg American, Hattiesburg students tour Jackson art installation March 20, 2014
“I am fascinated with what it means to figure things out together, and that tends to lead to collaborations and efforts I could never imagine on my own; collaborations which can begin to write our shared stories in ways which are empowering to individuals and not simply feeding institutions and systems which seem larger than our lives. ”
– daniel quoted in The Clarion Ledger, Artist engages Jackson with social artworks October 1, 2017
– communitydevelopment.art, PolicyLink research portal for Art Place America Community Development Investments, 2022
“Joeseph Miller, 10, sitting cross-legged on a blanket inside Core Sample, looked up and took in the bells all around, their patterns, symbols and interaction. ‘I like the decorations on them, and the way they’re set up. When you touch one, it pushes more,’ and a sort of music results.
‘I think these are handcrafted and that kids might’ve done them,’ surmised Malachi Reese Knight, 11.
‘Like everything else in the city, you have to engage and participate in order to be effective,’ observed Dorothy Triplett, who’d wandered by Core Sample for a closer look. She fingered a few bells, savoring their sound. ‘And the more people you have, the more beautiful the music.’”
– Hattiesburg American, Hattiesburg students tour Jackson art installation March 20, 2014
“I am fascinated with what it means to figure things out together, and that tends to lead to collaborations and efforts I could never imagine on my own; collaborations which can begin to write our shared stories in ways which are empowering to individuals and not simply feeding institutions and systems which seem larger than our lives. ”
– daniel quoted in The Clarion Ledger, Artist engages Jackson with social artworks October 1, 2017
daniel@significantdevelopments.us