Johanna Poethig

Johanna Poethig is a visual, public artist and performance artist who has exhibited internationally creating public artworks, murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations for over 3 decades. She received the prestigious California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award in 2022. Her multidisciplinary art practice plays between realism and abstract forms, architectural and intimate scales, historic and present day events, collaborative processes, scientific research and speculative storytelling. Over the course of her career she has been a bridge between diverse communities and professions in an evolving public sphere developing overlapping skills in conceptualization, collaboration and execution of ideas in multiple forms. In her current work the mathematically patterns of life systems and the extraterrestrial quasicrystal non-repeating pattern provide ways to visualize seemingly impossible futures, realized in new ceramic forms this year through the Betty Woodman Residency in Florence, Italy. Her most recent public projects are a 25' x 25' architectural metal relief for the San Jose Fire Department, a large scale painting relief installed in Chinook Elementary School in Washington, the restoration of her 1984 nine story landmark mural on Filipino Immigration to the United States, 65 foot mosaic for Rainbow Rec Center in Oakland and the 1.5 million 9 mile public art project for AC Transit. Her video and performance work includes Angelica Festival in Italy, the David Ireland House/ 500 Capp Street Project, Transi(en)t Manila, EARTH residency at Krowswork in Oakland, “Glamorgeddon: The Spectacle” at SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco. She has exhibited at the de Young Museum, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery with the Great Wall of Los Angeles project, Luggage Store Gallery, Togonon Gallery, Mercury 20 Gallery, 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.