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Johanna Poethig is a visual, public and performance artist who has exhibited internationally and has been creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations for over 40 years. Her practice plays between realism and abstract forms, architectural and intimate scales, historic and present day politics, futurist musings, humor and satire, a feminist point of view, collaborative processes and cultural critique. She invents card reading systems that consider time, place, ancient and current practices of prediction and chance operations methodologies. In her current work, in the midst of climate crisis, the mathematical patterns in nature’s terrestrial and extraterrestrial life systems are expressed by creating experiential landscapes,  surrealistic portraits and texts that come together in a speculative storytelling.  The tension between what we observe in nature and through scientific inquiry and how humans have always tried to predict the future through oracles, random practices and political punditry fascinates her. Interspecies communication crosses technology, plants, fungi and lichen in ceramic and painted microphones coming together for a Plant Press Conference.  She is currently transmitting through hand held ceramic radios, original songs and video on her conceptual Radio Earth Station as performance persona DJ Enlichenment.  An avid swimmer she is always ready to jump in the waters of a reasonably heated public pool, a spring fed lake or ocean with gentle waves. Her most memorable snorkling was on Apo Island in the Philippines and favorite urban swim hole is The Point along the shores of Chicago’s Hyde Park. Floating, suspension and atmospheric movement layers in her paintings.

Poethig’s public art works intervene in the urban landscape, on freeways, transit corridors, in parks, hospitals, schools, homeless shelters, cultural centers and civic buildings. She scales buildings and creates site specific designs by herself and with other artists, architects, urban planners, arts commissions, specific communities and cultural groups. She addresses social and aesthetic issues in artistic forms that use methods of collaboration and improvisation. She has received numerous commissions and awards for this work; in 2021 the California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award. She has curated, produced and participated in performance events that mix feminism, global politics, costume, cabaret, experimental music and video.

Poethig is Professor Emerita of the Visual and Public Art (VPA) department at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). As an arts educator and socially engaged artist she deconstructs boundaries in a collaborative artistic process grounded in research, production, critique, improvisation and reciprocal learning.  She was raised in the Philippines and has lived in Chicago, San Francisco and Oakland since coming to the United States. She received her BFA at University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her interest in the dialogue between the public and personal, politics and aesthetics, the mathematical and the mystical, the ridiculous and the sublime and an inclusive cultural life inform her process and inspire her work.

For inquiries about exhibitions, projects, purchases or lectures contact: johanna@johannapoethig.com