221b inaugural spotlight artist: Jo-anne green
my introduction to Green and her work:
At the end of May this year, my good friend Jacki Apple wrote to me about Pursuing Reality: Possibilities, by Jo-Anne Green that we had talked about on the phone.
Jacki wrote in her email: “(It is) A really unique series of multi-layered photo collages. Each image leaves you with so much to think about. The images exist in deep time and yet are impermanent, temporal. They speak to both the mortality and fragility in all living things, and its extraordinary resilience and life force. They so eloquently express the interconnectedness of matter, consciousness, perception, and memory on a multi-sensory level. Truly poetic breathtaking work.”
Jacki simply wanted to know if I would recommend and endorse it, and pass it along to my photo and book colleagues. When I looked at it online, the work knocked me out. I immediately contacted Jo-Anne, and selections became the inaugural 221B exhibition. The work is virtually accessible on the website; however, the actual work is even more stunning. I am most appreciative of this artist and her work, and deeply indebted to Jacki, a great artist, person and friend.
More on Green and Her Work:
Jo-Anne Green was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa; she emigrated to the United States in 1983. From 2002 to 2016, Green was Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., a small nonprofit organization that was world renowned for Turbulence.org, Networked_Performance, Networked_Music_Review, Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art), Mixed Realities, Upgrade! Boston, and New American Radio.
Green received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honors in Printmaking and Art History from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa); a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art from UMASS Dartmouth; and a Master of Science in Art Administration from Lesley University. She volunteered for a Fund for a Free South Africa (FreeSA) from 1985 to 1992, where she co-founded Cultural Resistance to educate the American public about Apartheid. In 1999, Green was instrumental in starting the Artist-in-Residence Program at the University of New Mexico's High Performance Computing Center, which led to the founding of the Art Technology Center (ATC). She was Grants Administrator and, later, Program Coordinator for both the ATC and the Arts of the Americas Institute. She returned to Boston in 2001.
Green is also an artist, curator, designer, and writer. Her essay Parsing Truths was commissioned for Michael Takeo Magruder: (Re)mediation_s: 2000-2010; and her coauthored chapter Mixed Realities was published in Unsitely Aesthetics, edited by Maria Miranda. In 2013, she contributed an essay, Generative Systems: (Re)Producing Hands and Faces, to Sonia Landy Sheridan's Art at the Dawning of the Electronic Era: Generative Systems.
Green has exhibited her paintings, prints, one-of-a-kind artist's books, and installations in Johannesburg, Massachusetts and New York. Her first one-person exhibition, Well, as a result... was reviewed in the Boston Herald. Visit her website at http://sympoietic.net.
