This Spring I had the great pleasure and opportunity to develop work in the ceramics studio of the amazing Betty Woodman. The location overlooking the layered landscape of Tuscany and 30 minutes from Florence was spectacular. I started a new series of plant microphones that I will be working on over the coming year to create a Plant Press Conference that explores the concepts around inter species communication.
Stay tuned!
Woodmand Famiiy Foundation
Joins us on October 13!
40 years after I first painted this mural about the history of Filipino immigration to the Americas with Vicente Clemente and Presco Tabios in 1984, I climbed the 9 story scaffolding again to restore it with the help of artists Mariel Paat, Dev Heyrana and Pablo Ruiz-Arroyo.
This mural tells the history of the contributions of Filipinos in the United States in literature, nursing, medicine, labor organizing, fishing, farming, families, sports, education, fair housing, rights of WWII Veterans, the Lolas WWII Comfort Women fight to acknowledge and end sexual violence, the 1986 torch of the People Power Revolution resistance to authoritarianism, the honoring of heroes and winning of Olympic gold.
Please join us for the dedication on
Sunday, October 13, 2pm
or visit the mural in downtown San Francisco at
000 Lapu Lapu Street.
This mural is part of SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District
The restoration was sponsored by TODCO
Catbalogan on Samar Island 2024 Art and Music
Electric opening of The Great Wall of Los Angeles/ Judy Baca exhibit at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery Los Angeles on May 20, 2023 with so many of the people present and past who have a hand in making it. Lots of camaraderie all around! I’m on the current Artist Design Team and worked on colorations and designs . There are so many layers to making a project like this come to fruition. And so timely what with all the history deniers and book burners out there. Art for Art, Art to record, art to educate, art to make, art to share.
Judy Baca started this project decades ago ad created the SPARC: Social and Public Art Resource Center. The current project extends the wall for 1/2 mile!
https://sparcinla.org/programs/the-great-wall-mural-los-angeles/
I’ve been making connections through my work over the last 4 decades and was honored to receive the
California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award 2021-22
There are 21 CAC Legacy Artist Fellows as well as Emerging and mid-career Fellows.
“The Individual Artist Fellowships support artists from a broad spectrum of artistic practices, backgrounds, geographies, and communities, whose work addresses themes such as race, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, consistent with the goals of the Council,” said Council Chair Lilia Gonzáles-Chávez of Fresno.
City of San Jose Fire Department Training Center and Office of Emergency Management
I completed design phase for a new public artwork through the San Jose Public Art Program for a new training facility that is currently under construction. These are two different but related centers that work to mitigate disasters providing operational and tactical response in collaboration with and in service to the community.
I have a new mantra now: Prevent/Prepare/Respond/Recover
RESILIENT CITY
This symbol of resilience begins in the scattered blocks that transform up into a uniquely organized pattern framed by rays that extend up behind the City of San Jose. The three figures in the landscape celebrate fire fighters and emergency managers working in service to the community. The community of San Jose is represented in the downtown business and civic district cityscape, local historic and cultural sites and neighborhood homes. The colors, metal material, composition and placement of the artwork works within the architectural lines of the buildings and colors at the site. Details of this design include the Cesar Chavez Meeting Hall, historic Greenawalt House/Vietnamese Museum and the Peralta Adobe, the oldest buiding in San Jose. The mathematically complex non repeating pattern is generated by computer technology developed in this area. These patterns are technologically useful. The rays echo the City of San Jose logo.
Humming With Life Mural Restoration on La Cocina Municipal Marketplace
Years after the San Francisco Civic Center Post Office closed and the original mural had been painted over in orange and black stripes and tagged mercilessly, hummingbirds once again fly through the restored mural and circle lightly at the center of this garden, vibrant, fragile yet strong, pollinating this city corner with creative energy. Plant motifs are drawn from the visual traditions of San Francisco’s rich mix of cultures turning into trumpets and other musical symbols representing the music and art in the Tenderloin neighborhood. The mural now wraps La Cocina Municipal Market Place, an incubator program and the nation’s first women-led food hall. Portraits of La Cocina’s chefs, low-income and immigrant women entrepreneurs, greet the public as they enter the building.
Mural Team: Luis Parra Dzul, Cesar Moreno, Elaine Chu, Pablo Ruiz Arroyo, Matthew Floriani, Taylor Coburn and Stefhani Godinez
Funded by: SF Department of Public Works and SF Community Challenge Grant
See the time lapse document of the restoration:
https://lacocinamarketplace.com
Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow
This year the AC Transit TEMPO Line is in full operation. The public artwork at each station is the artistic centerpiece of this new transportation infrastructure.
Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow is a 9 mile, 1.5 million public art work created with Lead Artist Johanna Poethig, Mildred Howard, Peter Richards, Joyce Hsu which employs a ribbon of words and neighborhood iconography to enhance the new AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Line that connects downtown Oakland, International Boulevard, to San Leandro. Workshops with Oakland’s “Youth Uprising”, San Leandro residents and the broader community, informed, inspired and guided the artists design process. Local poet and writer Elmaz Abinader contributed to the text as it was developed resulting in a 9mile long poem. Light responsive honeycomb-hex panels, designed for the Enhanced Stations, punctuates the lively visual environment as they respond to people and vehicles moving by. Each Station is a landmark riffing on the unique cultural and social environment of the surrounding neighborhood. Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow considers transportation in the context of all the human constructed systems which enable us to live and prosper on this planet. Moving people and goods freely from one place to another, along with education, communication, commerce, clean water, energy, waste management are just a few of the ways we have devised to provide for fulfilling lives. A sign of a healthy society is when all of these systems flow together in harmony. This is an unfolding work of art that offers a continuous experience of discovery along the TEMPO BRT route.
Here are Links to the article about the project by Maria Porges in Sculpture Magazine and the book:
https://johannapoethig.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ACT-BRT-Cultural-CorridorUrban-Flow.pdf?189db0&189db0
Quasi Extraterratropozine Volume 1 and 2
published by Pro Arts Commons
I’ve been writing fabulist fictions that chronicle the rise of Terrestrial Terminal Earth Stations and their new symbiotic life forms, rising out of the wreckage of climate crisis and cargo cult capitalism, skillfully orchestrated by Terraqueous, Troposphere and Extraterrestrial in collaboration with Time, all major players in the theater of the Cosmos.
These zines are available at my new shop along with other artworks and prints:
https://johanna-poethig-studio.square.site
or at Pro Arts Commons:
https://www.proartscommons.org/store/quasi-extraterratropozine-vol-1-by-johanna-poethig
Solo Show
HIDE OUTS, ESCAPE HATCHES and a SUBMARINE
Mercury 20 Gallery Feb 18 – March 19 2022
Review in Daily Californian
Surfacing Sound: Here is a link to the performance by Chris Brown and Laetitia Sonami
Dedicated to Richard P. Poethig, July 13, 1925 – Nov 22, 2021
October 17, 2020. This is an excerpt from Wall Stories, my upcoming book that tells the stories of my murals and public art projects. Artifact Earthquake is the story of painting the mural on SOMarts and the day that I was on site when the 1989 Earthquake hit. Today we are in another disaster, the COVID 19 pandemic and an excruciating wait for the results of the upcoming election to remove the disaster of a president and his regime from power. May it be so.
We live in a time where science is fake and social algorithms entrap us. For the past century, botanists have studied the nature of phyllotaxis and the algorithmic beauty of plant growth patterns. The science that uncovers these systems that create life is the inspiration for this series of paintings and prints. Phyllotaxis is the spatial and temporal arrangement of leaves or petals around a stem or plant axis. Parastichy is the invisible, hypothetical spiral line connecting a series of leaves on a stem that create an effect on the human eye. The surreal gardens that I paint overlay organically drawn and mathematically generated computer models of plant algorithms mixing realism and abstraction. The story of love and war imagines a world populated by futurist plant people tangling with misshapen primordia in the toxic sludge of human de-evolution using phyllotaxis and parastichy masks as subversive algorithmic shields.
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