Johanna Poethig

Artist Statement:

My work crosses the private and public realms. I create public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture, multi-media installations and performances.  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 and styles that best realize my ideas. I produce and participate in performance events that mix feminism, global politics, costume, cabaret, experimental music and video. One of my interests is to identify the ways artistic forms relate and overlap from different points of time and culture. In both my public and studio work I explore symbols and artifacts of culture, re-contextualizing them to elicit new meanings. This combination of work in the public sphere and studio sets the stage for a complex interrelationship of content, technique, scale, materials and social interactions. Sometimes it is the blend and many times the dissonance that inspires me.

Johanna Poethig was born in 1956, grew up in the Philippines and moved to Chicago in the mid 1970’s.  She has lived in the Bay Area since 1980.  She got her BFA at UC Santa Cruz and her MFA at Mills College.  She is a professor at the Visual and Public Art Department of CSU, Monterey Bay.  She has been commissioned to do public art projects across the United States.  Poethig has exhibited her work at the Galeria de la Raza, the Shadowshop project at SFMOMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Bay Area Now 5,  SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery, Togonon Gallery, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum, New Langton Arts, The Luggage Store Gallery, Kala Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts, SomArts, Manilatown Center, The Lab and Mag:net Gallery Katipunan in Manila. She recently had a residency at Montalvo Art Center in Saratoga, California.