Johanna Poethig
Instagram: @johannapoethigsilver
Website: https://johannapoethig.com
Bio: Johanna Poethig is a visual, public artist and performance artist who has exhibited internationally creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations. She received the California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award in 2021. Her multidisciplinary art practice plays between realism and abstract forms, architectural and intimate scales, historic and present day events, collaborative processes and scientific research. She is a story teller working in primarily in paint, ceramics, video and performance. In recent work plants, fungi and lichen take on a performative role as she explores ways to communicate forms of intelligence outside the scope of our human understanding. Her most recent public projects include the current Sonoma State Farmworker Mural re-visioning, an architectural metal relief for the San Jose Fire Department, a large-scale painting installed in Chinook Elementary School in Washington State, the restoration of her 1984 nine story landmark mural on Filipino Immigration to the United States and the 1.5 million 9 mile public art project for AC Transit. Her video and performance work includes Everywoman Biennial NYC 2026, Shapeshifters Cinema, West Oakland Sound Series, Angelica Festival in Italy, the David Ireland House/ 500 Capp Street Project, Transi(en)t Manila, “Glamorgeddon:The Spectacle” at SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco. She has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pen and Brush Gallery in NYC, The Luggage Store Gallery, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery with the Great Wall of Los Angeles project, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Boston Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Center, SF Galeria de la Raza, Headlands Center for the Arts, Museo ng Manila among others. She is Professor Emerita at the Visual and Public Art Department, California State University, Monterey Bay.
Statement: My work crosses the private and public realms. I have exhibited internationally and been actively creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture, community collaborations, multi-media installations and performances for over 4 decades. My public art works intervene in the urban landscape on public buildings, freeways, in parks, hospitals, jails, schools, universities, homeless shelters, and advertising venues. My paintings, sculpture, video and installations reflect my interest in form, narrative, symbol, satire, society and our colonialist consumerist culture. My work is conceptually driven but interpreted through materials that best realize these ideas. I produce and participate in performance events that mix feminism, global politics, costume, props, cabaret, experimental music and video. This combination of direct activist work in the public sphere and the exploration of my personal interests in my individual work enables me to develop my work through a complex interrelationship of content, technique, scale, materials and social interactions. Sometimes it is the blend and many times the dissonance that inspires me. I grew up outside of the United States in the Philippines and this perspective has deeply influenced my work.
