About the Artist
The artist with Partenope, 1996, in her loft, 2022
Photo: Susan R. Danton
Joanne Mattera works in a style that is chromatically resonant and compositionally reductive. She has had solo shows in New York City at the Stephen Haller Gallery (1995), OK Harris Works of Art (1996, 2007), and ODETTA Gallery (2019).
Representation
In the New York City area, Joanne is represented by Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, Connecticut, formerly of Larchmont, New York, where her solo, The Silk Road Paintings, took place in May 2015. In Chicago she is represented by Addington Gallery where her first solo show there, Hue & Me, took place in September 2020. In Boston she is represented by Arden Gallery, where her 12th solo with the gallery (and 43rd career solo), is taking place February 2024. Some exhibition installations are viewable here.
Joanne is represented elsewhere around the country: in Atlanta by the Marcia Wood Gallery; in Denver by Space Gallery; in the Bay Area by Adler & Co. Gallery; and on Cape Cod where Looking Sharp: A Retrospective of Chromatic Geometries, a solo at Miller White Fine Arts took place in August 2022. Joanne also enjoys associations with Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York City, and Projects Gallery, Miami. She participates in curated exhibitions with American Abstract Artists in New York City and elsewhere. Her work is included in Geoform, an international online archive of geometric abstraction curated by the late artist Julie Karabenick.
Collections
Joanne's work is in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Connecticut College Print Department, New London; University Collections at the University of Albany, New York; Wheaton College, Norton, Mass.; the U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C.; and institutional and private collections internationally.
Writing and curating
In addition to her studio practice, Joanne writes regularly and curates, both online for her blog and in physical venues. Her memoir, Vita: Growing Up Italian, Coming Out, and Making a Life in Art, was published in 2019 by Well-Fed Artist Press in New York City. Through her Joanne Mattera Art Blog she reports on exhibitions and art fairs in New York City, Miami, and elsewhere.
Curatorial projects in physical spaces include Luxe, Calme, et Volupté: A Meditation on Visual Pleasure in 2007 for the Marcia Wood Gallery; Textility in 2012 at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, with the institution’s curator, Mary Birmingham; projects at the Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown in 2011 and 2012; A Few Conversations about Color at DM Contemporary in Manhattan in 2015; Depth Perception in 2017 at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, Massachusetts, which she curated with Cherie Mittenthal in conjunction with the 11th International Encaustic Conference; and,currently, A Legacy of Making: 21 Contemporary Italian American Artists at the Calandra Institute in Midtown Manhattan, co-curated with Joseph Sciorra, which is up through April 2024.
The online project Italianità brings together the work and stories of visual artists who are Italian American. While the artists' aesthetic may not in all instances be reflective of their experience as first-, second-, or even third-generation Italian Americans, their stories offer interwoven threads of language and culture within the Italian diaspora. In 2023 the online project became a book, Italianità: Contemporary Art Inspired by the Italian Immigrant Experience.
Joanne is the founder and director emerita of the International Encaustic Conference, an event devoted to a contemporary medium with a historic past. Relatedly, she is the author of the preeminent book on encaustic, The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (Watson-Guptill, 2001).
Joanne divides her time between Manhattan and Massachusetts.
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