Studio News 2021 – 2022 – Johanna Poethig

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

https://arts.ca.gov/press-release/california-arts-council-announces-2021-individual-artist-fellows/?fbclid=IwAR0dZfi8jhb__3RNPw5m2xzmJlkhHBaoww5aqNVIJJptVBh7QEm52Zntmnw

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://vimeo.com/560519566

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://sculpturemagazine.art/poetry-in-motion-a-conversation-with-mildred-howard-and-johanna-poethig/

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.