Mary Johnson, right, her son, Greg, left, and grandson Webster. Greg is a sculptor who created the artwork directly behind them.
Mary Johnson’s son, Greg, has long been known for his talents at restoring wrecked cars. He started doing automotive body repair and painting in high school and opened his own shop in 1979.
But Greg had the urge not just to fix, but to create. So, in 1996, he shifted gears. Greg built a sculpture studio in his auto body shop in downtown Wichita, where he fashions large-scale sculpture out of cast-off auto parts.
In February, Mary, a resident of The Westerly Residences at Wichita Presbyterian Manor, accompanied more than a dozen of her fellow campus residents on a tour of her son’s studio. “They were all delighted. They said it was the best trip they ever had,” Mary said.
The tour drew more men than usual, Mary added, and they were just as entertained by checking out the cars undergoing repair on the body shop side of Greg’s business. The studio, however, is dominated by bold, brightly colored works of art. Greg’s raw material is primarily old fenders, hoods, and other automotive salvage. He reshapes, repaints, and reimagines it as a glorious angel, a delicately detailed mother and child, a kinetic tornado, and more.
A few of Greg’s pieces have also been installed in Old Town as public art, designed to move in concert with the Kansas wind.
“It’s really interesting work,” Mary said. “The angel is 14 feet high — he’s a big rascal. He can do delicate pieces too. The details in the baby the woman is holding are marvelous.”
One of her favorite pieces was a little 8-inch pot-bellied man that she used to display at home; she returned it to Greg’s safekeeping when she moved to The Westerly.
Greg is one of Mary’s four children; three of them are still in the Wichita area. The whole family came to celebrate her 90th birthday at Presbyterian Manor in March. And they recently learned that Greg’s son, Webster, will follow in his father’s footsteps: he was accepted to begin the automotive design program at the University of Kansas next fall.
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