7-04-2026 4:19am

MACON VISIONARY: Johnny Mo and the Art of Coming Back to Macon

Nate Weeks Editor

Johnny Mollica with The Church of Duane Allman at CreekFest 2026 (Photographer Nate Weeks)

If you've enjoyed the beautiful folk art and live blues music at the All Blues Music and Art Revivals in 2023 and 2025 in Macon's Mill Hill, enjoyed the artistic details found inside the renovated historic Grant's Lounge, or stepped inside a vintage band trailer packed wall-to-wall with portraits and art devoted to the life and philosophy of Duane Allman, you're already familiar with the work of Johnny Mollica.

Known around Macon simply as "Johnny Mo," the self-taught artist, screen printer, and music promoter has spent nearly a decade since his return to town becoming one of the busiest creative forces in Middle Georgia and, by his own cheerful admission, the founder of an art movement he can't control.

Mollica initially sat down with the Middle Georgia Times at Grant's Lounge in December 2021, then we caught up with him more recently at CreekFest 2026, where he had brought The Church of Duane Allman, and during another interview.

During our wide-ranging conversations about his art, we discussed his winding road to Macon, and the community work that keeps him here. In the years since our initial conversation, his footprint on the city's creatives has only grown.

His origin story starts about as far from Middle Georgia as you can get: a basement woodshop in Boston. His father was a skilled carpenter, and young Johnny glued scrap wood into little houses, the beginning of a habit that never left. "A lot of stuff that I still do," he said.

His formal art education consisted of a magazine subscription. "I always say that I learned everything about art from Mad magazine," Mollica said. "Never studied art. Just did it from the beginning."

What he did study was economics, at college in Memphis, a degree he laughs about now. "You don't realize how many jobs there are in art," he said. "And then you also don't realize that whatever you were put here to do, that's what you're gonna do, whether it's paying a million dollars or five bucks. You're gonna do it. I've owned a number of businesses, but had to come back to being what I really am."

The road from that Memphis classroom to Macon ran through a T-shirt design. Out of college in the early 1990s, Mollica ran a screen print shop in Memphis, and by 1994, he was creating art for the newly formed Southern rock jam band Gov't Mule.

Somewhere along the way, another artist who had made a black-and-white Duane Allman shirt passed the artwork along to him. Mollica straightened up the lettering, rebuilt the design in four colors, and sold the shirts at Allman Brothers shows. You can still see a framed print of the design, which reads "Skydog Lives," hanging inside the Church of Duane Allman today.

Over the years, his posters, album art, and merchandise designs would serve dozens of bands, among them the Allman Brothers Band, Gov't Mule, Derek Trucks, and Susan Tedeschi.

Mollica was selling merch and working as a drum tech for Gov't Mule when he was first pulled to Macon in the mid-1990s. The band's tour manager, Kirk West, a longtime Allman Brothers insider and tour manager, invited him to take a room in the house West had bought next door to the Big House on Vineville Avenue, the famed communal home of the band.

The house, then known as the House of Music, held a music magazine's offices and a merchandise company downstairs. "I lived upstairs with the photographer and the editor from the magazine," Mollica recalled. "I'd do little art pieces for them. Whatever had to be done."

Mollica was restless in those days, and he soon left for Atlanta, where a screen printing shop kept him busy creating psychedelic art for the fast-expanding Mellow Mushroom restaurant chain.

He stayed on the move during those years of his life, going back to Massachusetts to open another print shop, "for what I thought would be three months, but it turned out to be 10 years." The New England winters finally did what no career opportunity could.

"I got to my wits' end there with the cold weather," he said. "I poked around a little bit, called some people, realized everybody I knew in Macon was still living here, and I just thought: I can't go wrong."

He landed back in Macon for good around 2016, and he hasn't slowed down since. His signature work runs on a simple philosophy of collaboration with decay: large paintings and found-object assemblages built from bottle caps, rusty metal, weathered wood, and whatever the street and the dumpster provide.

"Mother Nature already does the technique to the stuff that's discarded," he explained. "Weathers it, rusts it, puts all good character on it. When I see it, I immediately have ideas of how it fits in my art."

He files it all under a banner of his own invention: the Middle Georgia Absurdist Art Movement. Asked to define absurdist art, Mollica doesn't reach for theory. "It's a big jumble of really weird, far-out stuff that you sometimes can't relate to anything," he said. "It's almost a product of the times now, because things are just so ridiculous that you have to just embrace the absurdity and go beyond it."

Mollica is serious about the Middle Georgia Absurdist Art Movement's independence from him, though: "You can create a movement, but you can't necessarily control it. You can't decide who's in it. You got to just let it go."

Since sitting down with the Times, Mollica took part in a bicentennial art show in Macon that opened in March 2023 and ran through the end of December that year. In August 2024, Mollica's artwork was on display in "Goin' Down Slow," an exhibit at the Macon Arts Alliance gallery pairing his work with Adam Smith's photography.

The Macon Arts Alliance honored him with a 2023 Macon Arts Cultural Award for his work promoting local artists and musicians. His earlier credits include the 2017 revitalization of the Capricorn Records murals alongside fellow artist Michael Pierce and the 2020 "Visionary Roots" show at the 567 Center for Renewal.

Michael Pierce, the Macon-born muralist whose work covers the restored Capricorn studios and whose gourd and found-object art has made him a fixture of Georgia folk art, has known Mollica since their paths crossed in the Allman Brothers orbit of the 1990s. Ask him about his old friend, and Pierce describes a one-man welcoming committee.

"He is the mover and shaker of Macon, Georgia, in the music and art scene, the man about town everyone wants to be next to," Pierce says, "Rock stars, street people, young and old, they can spot him a mile away. Here he comes walking down the street: hey, hey, here comes Mo Joe."

Another well-known Maconite, Saralyn Collins, the entrepreneur behind Macon's popular farm-to-table restaurant Grow, tells the Middle Georgia Times she has seen Mollica's impressive skill set up close. "I know he can do anything. He just framed out our deck. He painted the restaurant. He's one of those people who is an amazing artist, but also has a ton of practical knowledge."

Mollica put it more simply back in 2021, describing his role around the House of Music: "I do it all."

Mollica's most singular creation may be the Church of Duane Allman: a mobile art exhibit housed in a trailer with an Allman family pedigree of its own.

"I was painting all these portraits of Duane and making frames for them, and I thought: I've got too many of these things, I've got to put them in one place where people can look at them as one thing," he said.

After drummer Butch Trucks died in 2017, bassist Berry Oakley Jr., son of the Allman Brothers' founding bassist, was selling the trailer the two had used with Butch Trucks and the Freight Train Band. Mollica bought it, and he and his son lined the interior with beadboard and wooden ceiling planks salvaged from Macon buildings, then filled it with installations of bottle caps and rusted metal framing his Duane portraits.

"It's still a work in progress," he said in 2021, "but it's pretty cool. It's just a little roving art museum with nothing in it but Duane."

The work in progress has become much more than that since 2021. Once it was ready for the public, Mollica first took the museum to Macon's Skydog Festival, the annual Central City Park celebration of Duane Allman's birthday and life that benefits Depaul USA Daybreak.

The Church of Duane Allman has also appeared at Pasafest, the annual music and folk art festival at Pasaquan (which returns on October 24, 2026, after a long hiatus), and has traveled elsewhere across Georgia and into neighboring states. The church has no permanent home, so between outings to events like the Skydog Festival and Pasafest, its Facebook page is the reliable place to see it.

Mollica asks that you just don't call him a preacher. "It's not really a church," Mollica said with a grin. "I'm not a preacher, and Duane's not a saint. It's just a name for it."

When Mollica returned to Macon and wanted to put on a rock and roll show, he looked around downtown and landed on the most storied small stage in town: Grant's Lounge, the Poplar Street club founded in 1971 by Ed Grant Sr. and known as the original home of Southern rock, carried on today by his children Edward Grant Jr. and Cheryl Grant Louder.

"I talked to Ed and Cheryl Grant, and they seemed like they were embracing it," Mollica said. "I put something in, and it did great." He has since stepped back from promoting, describing himself as simply "on the team," handling graphics and advertising. He still works at the club occasionally, and his renovation contributions to the historic establishment have ranged from the remodel of its famous Wall of Fame, a project he started in 2020, to the suitably humble job of putting up the kitchen sign.

The stage has stayed busy with his fingerprints on it. On New Year's Eve 2021, Grant's hosted a 12:30 a.m. set from Berry Oakley's Jive Ass Review, a late-night blues outfit Mollica had staged with Oakley a half dozen times, as the after-party for the Allman Family Revival at the Macon City Auditorium. That edition featured blues guitarist Larry McCray and bassist Pedro Arevalo, a veteran of Dickey Betts' band.

Mollica's biggest swing came in October 2023, when he and the All Blues Cultural Preservation Society launched the inaugural All Blues Music & Arts Revival at Mill Hill, a two-stage festival that paired a Southeastern folk-art expo with headliners including soul legend Bettye LaVette and McCray.

The Revival returned in October 2025, opened by Macon blues guitarist Robert Lee Coleman, the former James Brown sideman whom Mollica now manages, with the Church of Duane Allman parked on the grounds.

The festival will be back for a third edition in 2027. It runs only in odd-numbered years, a quirk of the calendar Mollica has fully embraced. "It's an odd festival," he said.

Add his annual multi-artist Folk Blues Art Show at Grant's, and the man who described himself in 2021 as "all burnt out from doing these events" has, if anything, been doing more of them.

Then there's the quieter work. Mollica's very first show at Grant's was a benefit for the Mentors Project of Bibb County, the nonprofit previously led by executive director June O'Neal that has paired at-risk Bibb County students with adult mentors since 1990. Since our first interview in 2021, Mollica has become the Board President of the nonprofit.

Mollica became a volunteer workhorse for the organization, driving trucks, hauling donated furniture, and staging roughly one benefit show a year, as he described his routine in 2021. "There's always some need for volunteers," he said, noting that the project welcomes new mentors and that business owners can offer students internships and jobs "and sort of guide them in life, so that they'll stay in school."

The mentoring runs through his art world, too. Rhonda "Sunshine" Miller, the self-taught Macon multimedia artist whose expressive paintings have hung everywhere from folk art shows at Grant's Lounge to the Tubman Museum, and whose work featured prominently at the All Blues Revival, credits Mollica with opening the door to her tradition.

"Johnny Mo is more like my folk art savior. I never knew about folk art before I met him," Miller tells the Times. "We met years ago, and he told me, 'Yo, Ronnie, you got it, you see.' I don't know what he meant by that, but he is an amazing person."

Mollica still lovingly teases her when she is creating new work by telling her to "throw some rice on it," a nod to the rice she worked into one of her early pieces.

At the time of the first interview in 2021, Mollica was extra busy keeping a hand in his first trade, printing shirts for the Big House Museum and select events through his small merchandise company.

Today, he continues to be a resource, mentor, and creative powerhouse in Middle Georgia. Some of his impressive artwork is available for purchase through his Blue Sweetness website, where he cites his mission to "strengthen community through the power of art and music." For anyone who knows Mollica, there is no doubt of his commitment to that noble mission.

For a man who once believed art was "just a hobby" nobody could live on, Johnny Mo has built a life in Macon that proves his mother right. She always told him he was already an artist. It just took a while, through Boston, Memphis, Atlanta, Massachusetts, and then two stints in Macon, to stop fighting it.

"You can fight it," he said, "but then you're going to pay for it. You're not gonna be in the right place."

Johnny Mollica, it's safe to say, is in the right place.