Josette Urso is an American artist based in Brooklyn.Hodara, Susan. "Josette Urso Paintings Translate Visual Cues into Colorful Abstraction," Hamptons Art Hub, January 22, 2018. Retrieved September 22, 2025. Her art includes dense, largely abstract paintings and collages, drawings and paintings of land- and urban-scapes, and mixed-media constructions.Naves, Mario. "In a Season of Abstract Painting at New York Galleries, These Two Artists Stand Out," The New York Sun, July 23, 2024. Retrieved September 22, 2025.Donohoe, Victoria. "Inspired Artistry in a Show of Fabric Collage," The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 7, 1999.Bennett, Lennie. "Land escapes - The outdoor paintings of husband and wife artists Peter Schroth and Josette Urso," St. Petersburg Times, February 28, 2005.Braff, Phyllis. "Four Young Prize-Winners Take a Variety of Paths," The New York Times, December 13, 1987. Retrieved September 22, 2025. She reconfigures fragments of her everyday, immediate environment in shifting, multi-perspectival artworks whose assembled quality has been likened to cubist-influenced art. Her early mixed-material works incorporate primordial, biomorphic references,Altabe, Joan. "Urso in Control of Familiar & Fantastic," Sarasota Herald-Tribune, May 17, 1996.Mahoney, Robert. "Passages: Josette Urso's Mind Garden," Josette Urso, DeLand, FL: Museum of Art – DeLand, 1993. Retrieved September 30, 2025. while her landscape and cityscape works from the 2000s have a loose representational style.Bianchi, Robert S. "Big Apple in a Small Tableau," Tampa Bay Illustrated, March 2006.Chapman, Jessica. "Josette Urso," Orlando Arts Magazine, March/April 2013, p. 62. In her later, more abstract paintings, Urso piles and juxtaposes marks, visual contrasts, coincidences and allusions, creating unexpected leaps of scale, color and spatial orientation.Smith, Roberta. "Josette Urso: 'Snow Day,'" The New York Times, March 8, 2013. Retrieved September 22, 2025.Newhall, Edith. "Precisely Nowhere," The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 17, 2012. In 2024, New York Sun critic Mario Naves wrote, "[Urso's] canvases are rich, layered, scrabbled, and encompassing … Each picture is a kaleidoscopic commingling of patterns, textures, diagrammatic notations, and bumptious, cartoony blips. The compositions suggest topographical landscapes put through a technological wringer."
Urso has been recognized by organizations including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Josette Urso, Artists. Retrieved September 22, 2025.College Art Association. "CAA News Today: Grants, Awards, and Honors," October 2013. Retrieved September 30, 2025.National Endowment for the Arts/Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. Regional Visual Arts Fellowships 1994 & 1995, p. 88. Her work is held in the collections of the Mint Museum,Mint Museum. "Under Construction: Collage from The Mint Museum." Retrieved September 22, 2025. Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art,Stehle, Emily Lee. "Material Mastery: Florida CraftArt Permanent Collection of Fine Craft," Creative Pinellas, August 9, 2023. Retrieved September 22, 2025. Racine Art Museum,Racine Art Museum. "Zero Waste: Objects," Exhibit, 2024. Retrieved September 22, 2025. Ballinglen Museum of Art,Ballinglen Museum of Art. Josette Urso, The Glen off Crossmolina Road, Artworks. Retrieved September 22, 2025. and Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art, among others.Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art. Josette Urso, Artists. Retrieved September 22, 2025. She has exhibited at venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Drawing Center,Brenson, Michael. "Influences From the Untaught: Contemporary Drawing at The Drawing Center," The New York Times, November 4, 1988. Retrieved September 22, 2025. U.S. Art in Embassies Program,U.S. Department of State. Josette Urso, Art in Embassies Program. Retrieved September 22, 2025. New York Public Library,New York Public Library. "Art in the Windows - Josette Urso,", 2011. Retrieved September 22, 2025. and Tampa Museum of Art.Tampa Tribune. "Gallery Glimpses," January 10, 1996. She teaches at The Cooper Union in New York.The Cooper Union. Josette Urso, People. Retrieved September 22, 2025.
Life and career Urso was born and grew up in Tampa, Florida; her mother painted and her father, a mathematician, played classical guitar.Marger, Mary Ann. "Elements of Style," St. Petersburg Times, March 13, 1990.Reep, Richard. "Maitland Art Center returns to roots: Artist Josette Urso inaugurates its reborn artist-in-residence program," Orlando Weekly, April 23, 2013. Retrieved September 22, 2025. She graduated from the University of South Florida with a BFA in drawing and an MFA in painting in 1984, having studied with painters including Mernet Larsen and Bruce Marsh; during that period, she also attended the Art Students League of New York.Voeller, Megan. "Josette Urso's Site Lines," Creative Loafing Tampa, August 12, 2006. Retrieved September 22, 2025. In 1986, Urso relocated to New York. She began teaching at The Cooper Union in 1998,The Cooper Union. "Josette Urso". Retrieved September 22, 2025. having previously taught at the Chautauqua School of Art from 1985 to 1990, and at other institutions.Bannon, Anthony. "Faculty exhibit – calling card to community," Chautauquan Daily, August 2, 1988.Cano, Regina Garcia. "VACI lecturer Urso discusses her process of creating art," Chautauquan Daily, July 14, 2009, p. 8.
Urso has had solo exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island (1987), Museum of Art - DeLand (1993), Tampa Museum of Art (1995), Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano (1997),Nemser, Cindy. Josette Urso, San Jose, Costa Rica: Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano, 1997. Museo de Las Americas (Puerto Rico, 2001),Vázquez, Lupe. "Variaciones en el Museo de las Americas," El Nuevo Dia, February 4. 2001. Gulf Coast Museum of Art (2006),Costello, Kevin. "Painters demonstrate diversity in style, technique," Sarasota Herald-Tribune, February 26, 2006. Retrieved September 22, 2025. New York Public Library (2011), Maitland Art Center (2013), and Morean Arts Center (2018).Duffy, Maggie. "Three exhibits at the Morean Art Center and a provocative new show at Tempus Projects," Tampa Bay Times, September 29, 2017. Retrieved September 22, 2025. She has had gallery exhibitions at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts (2000–24) and Kenise Barnes (2009–24), among others.
Work and reception Urso works through an intuitive layering of marks, patterns, materials and imagery that explores the way meaning is constructed through perception and association.Voeller, Megan. "Draw Together Right Now," Creative Loafing Tampa, September 30, 2009. Her art (including the abstract work) is observation-based—a direct response to her surroundings: most prominently, the skylines, rooftops and sights of Brooklyn, the busy space of her Bushwick studio, and natural locales around the world.Segal, Mark. "Josette Urso at Markel," Hamptons Art Hub, July 16, 2020. Retrieved September 22, 2025. Travel, often made possible by artist residencies, plays a significant role in her work.Kuntz, Melissa. One View/Two Visions: Josette Urso and Peter Schroth, Tarpon Springs, FL: Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, 2005. Her approach is said to focus more on sensation than appearance, capturing in a quick, urgent manner her internal responses to a setting or environment.Ring, Jennifer. "How Hillsborough Community College became a Tampa Bay art destination," Creative Loafing Tampa, November 14, 2018. Retrieved September 22, 2025. The original referents in the work—at times visible but often obscure—are sometimes evoked in the titles of individual works or exhibitions.
Mixed-media works and collages
During Urso's first professional decade, critics related her mixed-media constructions and collages to the work of artists Paul Klee, Ree Morton, Sigmar Polke and Jean Tinguely, African art, and the feminist Pattern and Decoration movement.Copelon, Dianne. "Urso transforms the ordinary into works of art," The Orlando Sentinel, April 4, 1993.Plyler, Robert W. "A Night of Music, Poetry and Art Will Intertwine at JCC Jan 31," Post-Journal, January 1998.Koven, Ellen. "Women make positive statement in DeLand Museum show," DeLand Sun News, September 27, 1985.Rubinstein, Meyer Raphael. Living in New York, Montreal: Galerie Aubes 3935, 1988. She shared with the latter group tendencies toward irregular formats and edges, decorated frames, and non-traditional materials such as beads, buttons, glitter, wrapping paper, lace, toys and other common objects.Braff, Phyllis. "The Message in the Media," The New York Times, April 9, 1995. Retrieved September 22, 2025. Noting the work's blend of the familiar with fantastical, primitive forms (human, animal and vegetative), reviewers described the constructions as quasi-naïve "mind-gardens"Braff, Phyllis. "A Juried Show that Explores the Contemporary," The New York Times, November 9, 1986. Retrieved September 22, 2025. that suggested layers of memory and experience and allegories for universal, comic and tragic aspects of life. Phyllis Braff of the New York Times identified a "playful but emphatic disorientation" in the work, which challenged notions of pictorial illusion with its mix of two- and three-dimensional materials, painted and tactile surfaces, and abstract and biomorphic imagery.
After being invited to participate in a quilt show in the early 1990s, Urso made textiles and the patchwork format a significant part of her repertoire.Stewart, Laura. "Complete Fabrication," Tampa Tribune, April 9, 1993. In works like Twin (1996), she incorporated personal, natural and universal imagery into a grid system, bringing to the fore a new impulse to impose order on chaos; she has applied that impulse most prominently in her body of large, circular collages produced since 1998.Nigrosh, Leon. "Really Unreal," The Worcester Phoenix, November 17, 2000. Consisting of patterns, colors, forms and figures cut from printed or textured sources, their energized surfaces combine random elements with a more organized, meticulous approach to visual space, arranged around concentric, segmented circles; the collages evoke such things as quilts, mandalas and roulette wheels.Ormond, Mark. "Looking at Art Roundabout," Gulf Shore Life, January 2005, p. 32, 170.Fugate. Marty. "Visionary art exhibitions mark the close of 2017," Sarasota Herald Tribune, September 24, 2017. Retrieved September 22, 2025. At a distance, the collages appear largely abstract, but upon closer scrutiny, they offer visual themes and near-narratives exploring connections between humanity, nature and consciousness (e.g., Seventeen, 2005; Ladybug Ladybug, 2018).Cruz, Cooper. "Planet Picks," Creative Loafing Tampa, November 8, 2001. Retrieved September 22, 2025.Hammer, Esther. "Artists show domestic abstract impressions," Tampa Tribune, April 10, 2003.The New York Times. "Art Listings," March 29, 2015.
Plein air landscapes and drawings