Johanna Poethig
Johanna Poethig is an American Bay Area visual, public and performance artist whose work includes murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations. She has split her practice between community-based public art and gallery and performance works that mix satire, feminism and cultural critique. Poethig emerged in the 1980s as socially engaged collaborations with youth and marginalized groups gained increasing attention; she has worked as an artist and educator with diverse immigrant communities, children from five to seventeen, senior citizens, incarcerated women and mental health patients, among others. Artweek critic Meredith Tromble places her in an activist tradition running from Jacques-Louis David through Diego Rivera to Barbara Kruger, writing that her work, including more than fifty major murals and installations, combines "the idealist and caustic."
Poethig has been commissioned to create public art projects throughout the Bay Area and California, and in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cuba and Tbilisi, Georgia. She has exhibited internationally, and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Council, among others. Poethig is based in Oakland, California.
Early life and career
Poethig was born in 1956 in Morristown, New Jersey. Her parents, Eunice and Richard, both Presbyterian missionaries, moved the family to Manila shortly after Poethig's birth; she grew up in a Filipino community, speaking fluent Tagalog and learning about social issues and global politics from a Filipino perspective. In 1972, the family moved to Chicago, where she studied at the American Academy of Art and became interested in public art, by William Walker among others. In the late 1970s, she attended University of California, Santa Cruz, earning a BA in anthropology, politics and art in 1980.After graduating, Poethig moved to San Francisco and made connections with women artists and the SoMA Filipino community. Her work on a mural for The Women's Building with six artists in 1982 set her on a collaborative, public-art path. In the subsequent decade, she won mural commissions in the Bay Area and Los Angeles and California Arts Council awards; she also taught art at a SoMA mental health center.
Poethig augmented these experiences with graduate studies at Mills College, which added a more conceptual layer to her work. In 1994, she founded Inner City Public Arts Projects for Youth and served as artistic director for six years on a number of collaborative projects in San Francisco's Tenderloin and SoMA neighborhoods. That same year, she joined the faculty of the Visual and Public Art department at California State University, Monterey Bay, where she taught until 2018 and is Professor Emerita.
Work
In both public and gallery/performance art, Poethig draws on her cross-cultural experience and social consciousness to create inclusive work intended to offer an alternative to dominant advertising messages and American conventions of individualism and competition. Writers place her among a second generation of San Francisco community muralists, distinguished by their greater eclecticism, departure from the original Mexican mural model, and focus on identity issues. Her murals are noted for their mix of realist and expressionist modes, balance of message and aesthetics, atypical use of stylization and abstraction, and emphasis on previously unrecognized Southeast Asian communities. Poethig's gallery/performance work takes a satirical feminist approach, often critiquing glamour, consumerism and constructions of identity.Murals
Many of Poethig's murals pay tribute to San Francisco immigrant groups. Ang Lipi ni Lapu-Lapu depicts the origin legends and history of Filipino immigration to the United States, while Gabrielino Nation recognizes the Gabrielinos, the area's earliest inhabitants. In Lakas Sambayanan, she commemorated the peaceful overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship and rise to power of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines; its surreal central image depicts marchers pouring out of a shattered Ferdinand Marcos bust alongside images of Aquino cradling her slain husband, protesters and symbols of the country's catholic, Muslim and historic influences. The I-Hotel Mural —on San Francisco's International Hotel, a home to pioneer Chinese and Filipino immigrants demolished in 1977 and reopened in 2005—depicts the long struggle for low-income housing and features former residents and activists in that fight.The multistory Calle de la Eternidad represents the dislocation, adaptation and aspiration of the Los Angeles Latina/o community through a monumental pair of hands outstretched toward the sky, which emerge from an Aztec calendar containing an Octavio Paz poem; the title references the Broadway location, once a funeral procession route known as the "Street of Eternity." The colorful, three-dimensional Tiene la lumbre por dentro honors César Chavez and the Farm Workers Movement with images of Chavez, Dolores Huerta. the Filipino labor movement and workers' hands, Chavez's words, and non-traditional layered wood surfaces expressing the rawness of the land.
Some of Poethig's other well-known murals include the four-story Harvey Milk Memorial Mural, depicting Milk in a free-spirited scene at a pride parade; To Cause To Remember, an 80-foot image of a fallen Statue of Liberty chained at the feet, suggesting the nation's unrealized intentions; the 200-foot-long Stamps of Victory along Los Angeles's 110 Freeway, which celebrates sport as a conduit for communication and international relations with global soccer-themed postage stamps; and Loop Tattoo, which employs a central swirl of dancers, musicians and athletes to represent the city's rich cultural life and a community sensibility.
Two later works expand on the community theme: Intertwined encircles a Tenderloin low-income housing development in a colorful, eight-story ceramic-tile ribbon with outstretched hands and uplifting text, while the glass-mosaic Rainbow Power uses a colorful light-wave-like backdrop that intersects local youth figures as a metaphor for the benefits of shared culture, ideas and friendship. Skylight: Transmission of Knowledge/Windows to Justice takes a more global perspective that includes an oculus open to the sky and symbolic references to the environment and sustenance, justice, ancient and modern knowledge, and multi-national perspectives.
Other public works
Poethig's other collaborative public projects include ceramic-tile floor works and reliefs developed from fantastical children's drawings and youth workshops, playground and park sculptural installations, and city-sponsored poster and advertisement programs that incorporate conceptual approaches and critiques of capitalism. For Underdog Ad Agency, she designed bus shelter posters with incarcerated women that lampooned corporate marketing strategies and encouraged positive change; a 1999 collaboration with prison inmates and CSUMB students produced bus shelter posters that addressed rising incarceration rates. Subsequent projects include "How I Saved San Francisco: New Media Heroes" —featuring youths cast as social-change heroes in imitation-movie posters installed in city kiosks—and "Cab Top Ads", a series of ads on taxis that offered alternatives to media images of women and critical messages regarding objectification, sex work and gender issues.In 2014, Poethig and Mildred Howard were chosen by the East Bay Transit board as lead artists, with Peter Richards and Joyce Hsu, to integrate public art into the architecture of 34 planned stations along a new 9.5-mile system. The project, Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow—completed in early 2021—uses the title's flow motif, visually connecting the stations with a ribbon of descriptive and poetic words and images reflecting the many neighborhoods it passes through. Its elements were rendered in laser-cut aluminum on handrail panels and decorative windscreens. They incorporate community input, ideas and facts as well as aesthetic cues, while also taking advantage of shifts in light and cast shadow conditions to create. shifting visual interest.