Johanna Poethig (born 1956) is an American Bay Area visual, public and performance artist whose work includes murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations.Helfand, Glen. "Johanna Poethig," Bay Area Reporter, 1999.Burns, Lucy Mae San Pablo. "Your terno's draggin': Fashioning Filipino American performance," Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, July 2012, p. 199–217. Retrieved July 8, 2020. She has split her practice between community-based public art and gallery and performance works that mix satire, feminism and cultural critique.Drescher, Tim. San Francisco Murals: Community Creates Its Muse, 1914–1990, St. Paul, MN: Pogo Press, 1994.Cramer, Laura Jaye. "Kitschy, Trashy, Intelligent: 'Glamorgeddon. The Spectacle'", SF Weekly, January 6, 2015. Retrieved July 8, 2020.Corbin, Mary. "Johanna Poethig Uses Her Art for Sociopolitical Inquiry," Oakland Magazine, April 26, 2018. Retrieved July 8, 2020. Poethig emerged in the 1980s as socially engaged collaborations with youth and marginalized groups (e.g., by artists such as Tim Rollins and K.O.S.) gained increasing attention;Tanner, Marcia. "Auspicious Entries: Artists who collaborate with youth," Artweek, May 21, 1992, p. 24–5. 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.Amirrezvani, Anita. "Women's work," Contra Costa Times, February 6, 2000, p. C12.Chang, Gordon H., Mark Johnson and Paul Karlstrom. Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 263. Retrieved June 29, 2020.Viana, France. "Her Mission Was in the Cards," Positively Filipino, January 18, 2017. Retrieved July 8, 2020. 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."Tromble, Meredith. "Johanna Poethig," Driven, San Francisco: Togonon Gallery, 2007.
Poethig has been commissioned to create public art projects throughout the Bay Area and California, and in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cuba and Tbilisi, Georgia.Mosher, Mike. "Neighborhood Art Traffic Signals: Johanna Poethig's 'Freeway Prophecy' Mural," Bad Subjects, October 1998.Lara, Alison Neumer. "City's rich cultural blooms in mural," Chicago Tribune, December 7, 2005. Retrieved July 8, 2020.Garchik, Leah. "Hummingbirds in the Tenderloin," San Francisco Chronicle, September 1, 2011. Retrieved July 8, 2020. Retrieved July 8, 2020.Drake, Cathryn. "Tri, Tri Again," Artforum, November 2012. Retrieved June 29, 2020. 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 (BAM/PFA), 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 (NEA) and California Arts Council, among others.Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2000. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Ressler, Susan R. (ed). Women Artists of the American West, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc., 2003. Retrieved June 29, 2020. Poethig is based in Oakland, California.
Early life and career Poethig was born in 1956 in Morristown, New Jersey.Herbert, Susan. "Muralist Johanna Poethig," San Francisco Independent, January 19, 1989, p. 13. 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.Alba, Victoria. "Sino Ka? Ano Ka? Contemporary Art," in Pinay Power: Theorizing the Filipina/American Experience, Melinda L. de Jesús (ed.), New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 297–9. Retrieved July 8, 2020. 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 (South of Market) Filipino community.Lorca, Leonardo. "Cuando la Avenida Broadway era la 'Calle de la eternidad'", La Opinion (Los Angeles), 1993. 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 (MFA, 1992), 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.Zane, Maitland. "This Public Art Delights the Eye," San Francisco Chronicle, May 15, 1995, p. A12.Hutton, Stan. "The art of Johanna Poethig," San Francisco Study Center Central City Extra, 1995. That same year, she joined the faculty of the Visual and Public Art department at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), where she taught until 2018 and is Professor Emerita.Ferrera, Andrei. "Artfully Dedicated," Insights, 1998.
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.Moore, Sylvia. Yesterday and Tomorrow: California Women Artists, Midmarch Arts Books, 1989, p. 47. Retrieved June 29, 2020.Drescher, Tim. "Community murals: a step ahead of the times," Artweek, April 1992. Poethig's gallery/performance work takes a satirical feminist approach, often critiquing glamour, consumerism and constructions of identity.Matthews, Lydia. "Recipes for Pathological Happiness: The RX Series," Johanna Poethig: RX, San Francisco: Washington Square Gallery, 2000.
Murals Many of Poethig's murals pay tribute to San Francisco immigrant groups. Ang Lipi ni Lapu-Lapu (1984) depicts the origin legends and history of Filipino immigration to the United States, while Gabrielino Nation (1995, San Pedro, with Roberto Salas) recognizes the Gabrielinos, the area's earliest inhabitants.Marshall, Bob. "Milk Mural Madness," San Francisco Sentinel, July 10, 1987, p. 1, 9.Dunitz, Robin J. and James Prigoff. Painting the Towns: Murals of California, Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1997. Retrieved June 29, 2020.Ohanesian, Liz. "10 Awesome Pieces of Public Art in San Pedro," LA Weekly, July 19, 2016. Retrieved July 8, 2020. In Lakas Sambayanan (People's Power) (1986), 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.Moreno, Cherie M. Querol. "I-Hotel Muralist: FilAm in her heart," Philippine News, August 6–12, 2010, p. A1, A10. The I-Hotel Mural (2010)—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 (evicted) residents and activists in that fight.Garchik, Leah. "Pay-as-you-go Ferry Building tea party," San Francisco Chronicle, July 28, 2010. Retrieved July 8, 2020.
The multistory Calle de la Eternidad (1993) represents the dislocation, adaptation and aspiration of the Los Angeles Latina/o community through a monumental pair of hands outstretched toward the sky (and background skyscrapers), 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."Wetherbe, Jamie. "High-tech plans give new life to downtown mural," Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2012. Retrieved June 29, 2020.Public Art Review. "Muralist Spotlight," Fall 2005. The colorful, three-dimensional Tiene la lumbre por dentro (He Has the Fire Within Him) (2000, Sonoma State University) 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.Sonoma County Independent, "Chavez tribute," June 4–10, 1998.Public Art Review. "Recent Projects," Winter 1999, p. 42.
Some of Poethig's other well-known murals include the four-story Harvey Milk Memorial Mural (1988), depicting Milk in a free-spirited scene at a pride parade;Waugh, Dexter. "Panel approves compromise for mural about Milk," San Francisco Examiner, 1988. To Cause To Remember (1992), 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 (commissioned for the 1994 World Cup), which celebrates sport as a conduit for communication and international relations with global soccer-themed postage stamps;Martin, Hugo and Lorenza Munoz. "Taggers, Caltrans Take a Toll on Freeway Murals," Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2001. Retrieved July 8, 2020.Snow, Shauna. "The Arts," Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1994. Retrieved June 29, 2020. and Loop Tattoo (2005, Chicago), 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 (2010) 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 (2019, Oakland) uses a colorful light-wave-like backdrop that intersects local youth figures as a metaphor for the benefits of shared culture, ideas and friendship.Dudnick Laura. "Time-lapse photos show SF’s changing skyline," San Francisco Examiner, October 22, 2015. Retrieved June 29, 2020.Fiore, Heather. "Installation Case Study: Connecting to the community," Tile Magazine, July 18, 2019. Retrieved July 8, 2020.City of Oakland. "Measure KK at Work: Rainbow Recreation Center," News. Retrieved July 8, 2020. Skylight: Transmission of Knowledge/Windows to Justice (2019, CSUMB) 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.CSUMB Magazine. "New Home for Liberal Arts," December 20, 2019. Retrieved July 8, 2020.
Other public works