Joanna Pousette-Dart is an American artist, known for her shaped paintings, inspired by Islamic, Chinese, Mozarabic and Mayan art, among other traditions. Besides, she also taught at several educational establishments, such as Ramapo College of New Jersey, Yale University and Hunter College.
Background
Joanna Pousette-Dart was born in April 1947, in New York City, New York, United States. She is a daughter of an abstract expressionist painter and founding member of the New York School of painting, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Evelyn Gracey, a poet.
Education
In her early years, Joanna spent time at her father's (Richard Pousette-Dart, a painter) studio, working there, drawing, watching his processes, listening to music and talking. In her later years, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bennington College in 1968.
In her early years, Joanna served in various capacities. She worked for a law clerk, worked as a photo stylist, served in the welfare department, painting only at night or on weekends. She then finally landed a teaching job at Ramapo College of New Jersey (where she taught from 1972 to 1976) and the educational establishment gave her a bit more time to paint.
It was in the 1970's, that Joanna began living and working intermittently in New Mexico. Her perceptions of the place deeply influenced her paintings, ultimately resulting in the abandonment of a rectangular format in the 1990's for works, composed of curved panels. The dynamic configurations of these works evoke the constantly shifting light and form, the vastness of the spaces and the sense of the earth's curvature, that she experienced there. Her first shaped painting was made in 1993 and is composed of two roughly half circular shapes, that rested one on top of the other with the curved sides down. Her early paintings were all quite large, 9'×12' or so.
Joanna's works have been presented during many solo exhibitions, held at different galleries and museums, including the Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York City, New York (1976, 1978, 1979 and 1983), Janus Gallery, Los Angeles, California (1981), Scott Hanson Gallery, New York City, New York (1988), Schmidt-Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1988), Charles Cowles Gallery, New York City, New York (2004), Texas Gallery, Houston, Texas (2007, 2014), Moti Hasson Gallery, New York City, New York (2008), Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany (2019), Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2020) and Lisson Gallery, New York City, New York (2020), among others.
Besides, the painter's work has been represented during a number of group exhibitions, including those, that took place at Reese Paley Gallery, New York City, New York (1970), Santa Barbara Museum, Santa Barbara, California (1971), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York (1973), Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana (1980), Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York (1983, 1985), College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine (2001), Times Square Gallery, Hunter College, New York City, New York (2003), Plus Gallery, Denver, Colorado (2010), Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City, New York (2014), Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy (2017) and others.
It's also worth mentioning, that, besides working at Ramapo College of New Jersey in her early years, Joanna taught at other educational establishments, such as Yale University (1997) and Hunter College (1986-1999).
Currently, Joanna lives and works in New York City.
Having studied painting amongst the likes of Greenbergian Formalists Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, Joanna's experience as a painter rises from a rich tradition. However, despite this traditional modernist background, her works remain anything, but conventional. Her shaped paintings are unique in their melding of formal and poetic concerns and take their inspiration from many sources: Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalonian art, Chinese landscape paintings and calligraphy, Mayan and American Indian art, as well as the landscape itself, among others.
Pousette-Dart's paintings take many forms, each with its own dynamic sense of expansion and compression, buoyancy and gravity. The painted contours of the interior shapes create an added complexity, sometimes echoing the contours of the canvas and at other times challenging them. Joanna's use of color suffuses all elements with a sense of light, which feels redolent of the natural world.
Quotations:
"I think one of the primary jobs of a painter is to transform color into light. The kind of light is different for different artists. Since I'm interested in a certain relationship between light and form, which I associate with the natural world, flat, planar use of color doesn't work for me. I use whatever colors I need to in order to create the quality of light or the placement in space I'm looking for. I try to establish color relationships, that feel somehow believable or "real" in an ambient way. I don't have a fixed or identifiable palette, but I think my paintings have an identifiable quality of light."
"I began the shaped canvases in Galisteo, New Mexico. The curved shape enabled me to develop a pictorial expression, that seems to extend, that suggests movement, and that seemed to enable an expression of the immeasurable vastness and versatility of space as I had experienced there. I understood these images as a kind of dialogue between myself and the distant horizon."
Personality
Joanna is a committed feminist. Her grandmother was a suffragette and refused to adopt her grandfather's name, hence the hyphen in Pousette-Dart. Joanna believes, that it is still harder for women in every field. But she's never been drawn to making overtly political art. She also thinks, that being uncompromising in developing and following your own vision is a radical act in itself.