Detailed Biography

Johanna Poethig is a visual, public and performance artist who has exhibited internationally and has been actively creating public art works, murals, sculpture and installations over the last twenty years. She works in collaboration with other artists, architects, urban planners, specific communities and cultural groups. She was raised in the Philippines through high school, and has lived in Chicago and San Francisco since coming to the United States. She received her BFA from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California.

Ms. Poethig is on the faculty of the new Visual and Public Art Institute of California State University, Monterey Bay. She is artistic director for the Inner City Public Art Projects for Youth, a program of San Francisco's South of Market Cultural Center and Artspan. They have completed a body of ceramic public art works installed throughout downtown San Francisco. She has created a number of major murals through the San Francisco Mural Resource Center since the early 1980s. She has three major murals in Los Angeles commissioned through the Social and Public Art Resource Center, World Cup Soccer and the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. She created the ceramic entrance way for the New Children's Shelter in San Jose.

Through the San Francisco Art Commission she installed a series of ceramic installations for the new Tenderloin Playground created with neighborhood youth. She designed two series of bus posters in collaboration with women from the SF downtown jail and elderly artists. She recently produced the CD "Lick Me to Heaven" and the exercise video "Silver Abs and Golden Buns" with Barbara Golden and their group WIGband. In 1997 she completed a new facility at Fairmont Hospital in Alameda and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Initiative for her piece "The Untouchables: The Doll Collection, a portrait of the American Upper Caste," which was exhibited at The Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco.

Johanna Poethig's most recent work includes a new mural in Santiago de Cuba "Oiga Mi Llamada," painted with Cuban artist Carlos Rene Aguilera as part of INTER-NOS, an International Mural Painting Project. Her newest series of dolls, the "Babaylan Barbies" are part of the Manila/San Francisco Sister City Sisters Babaylan exhibit of Filipina American artists from the Bay Area. This exhibit is scheduled for September 1998 at San Francisco State University.

Johanna is also a member of the group DIWA, a Filippino American arts collective, whose work "Balikbayan Box: Tracing the Strains" was exhibited at the Bronx Museum in Spring 1998.

(1999 bio article by Bay Area Art Critic Glen Helfand)

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WHILE GETTING DOWN and dirty making art that brings people together on the streets and in the galleries, Johanna Poethig always manages to make the process look marvelous. For two decades she's been making collaborative inner-city mural projects (and friends) with homeless people, wayward youths, and various other communities in the Tenderloin, yet-to-be-gentrified pockets of SoMa, and similar locales across the U.S. and abroad. After putting in full days on recent projects for the Canon Kip Episcopal Community Services center, the SOMAR Teen Center, local prisons, and the S.F. Art Commission's Art-in-Transit program, the busy 42-year-old has been conceptualizing her millennium art project – "The Glamour Summit," an exhibition of her own satirical sculpture that opens at SOMAR Gallery next February. "I've been looking at the illusions of global glamour, the cult of beauty, the corporatization of culture – and a polka-dot scarf," she laughs.

It's just this mixture of political consciousness, girl power, endless enthusiasm, and a breezy sense of humor that Poethig brings to her personal and better-known public projects. While the art world may not give props to a mixed-media mural about transit on Clementina alley, the artist, by her demeanor alone, does much to erase the dour reputation of community-based art. "The pitfall for artists doing this kind of work is that we're associated with social work rather than people who deal with aesthetics," she says. Poethig is keenly aware of the seductive way visual material creates a cultural glue.

Poethig might have a better sense of cross-cultural phenomenon than most. She grew up in Manila with her missionary parents and still speaks Tagalog fluently. And she exploits her roots graciously. "People are stuck in neighborhoods," she says. "But it's in these projects where you can really cross those walls, build those bridges. If you create a work of art with someone, you're really trying to transcend that issue of separation." (Glen Helfand)

(http://www.sfbg.com/Goldies99/johanna.html)