13 Facts About Johanna Poethig

Johanna Poethig was born on 1956 and is an American Bay Area visual, public and performance artist whose work includes murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations.

Johanna Poethig has split her practice between community-based public art and gallery and performance works that mix satire, feminism and cultural critique.

Johanna Poethig has been commissioned to create public art projects throughout the Bay Area and California, and in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cuba and Tbilisi, Georgia.

Johanna Poethig 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 and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Johanna Poethig has been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Council, among others.

Johanna Poethig augmented these experiences with graduate studies at Mills College, which added a more conceptual layer to her work.

Johanna Poethig's 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.

Many of Johanna Poethig's murals pay tribute to San Francisco immigrant groups.

In 2014, Johanna 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.

Much of Johanna Poethig's work explores mainstream and cross-cultural constructions of identity.

In 2016, Johanna Poethig curated "Songs for Women Living With War", which memorialized and gave voice to the experiences of women in war, in particular, Filipino "comfort women" during World War II.

Johanna Poethig has been recognized by the California Arts Council, Social and Public Art Resource Center in Los Angeles, National Endowment for the Arts, and Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, among others; her ceramic-and-paint mural Dragonfly won a San Francisco Beautification Award.

Johanna Poethig has received artist residencies in Manila and Tbilisi, and at the Montalvo Arts Center and Headlands Center for the Arts, among others.