Joan Linder

In a culture hyper-saturated by electronic imagery I use traditional materials—pen, ink watercolor and paper—to create images and objects that explore the sub-technological processes of observation and mark making. Through the continual act of slow looking, I describe an intense response to my subject matter, which is as contemporary as my means are old-fashioned. My work, often a meditation on the quotidian, engages imagery such as sinks full of dishes and discarded amazon boxes to the mundane landscapes in my region that contain buried toxic chemicals and radioactive waste including the eponymous Love Canal and lesser known Lake Ontario Ordnance Works. I consider themes of power, politics, sexuality, history and the every day.

Hooker 102nd Street, 2016, 6 books; 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. each when closed; each 60 accordion pages; each 5 1/2 x 105 in. when opened, the entire piece is about 550” long when in display. 6" x 60 running feet of pen-and-ink landscape drawing of toxic waste sites in Buffalo/Niagara Falls is a drawing on one side of the fence at LOVE CANAL, made from direct observation in notebooks.

Thumbnail - Birds, Bugs and Beasts, 2021. PS97 Addition lobby entrance, 1855 Stillwell Ave, Brooklyn. Collection NYC Department of Education, Public Art for Public Schools. Joan Linder’s site-specific artwork designed for the lobby of the new PS 97 addition presents a diverse and fantastical ecosystem. The artwork consists of two digitally-printed porcelain tile murals on each side of the entrance and porcelain enamel birds mounted to the soffit above. Intending to bring the outside in and compliment the energy of the neighborhood. Linder spent time in Bensonhurst making drawings, taking photographs, and researching migratory, invasive, cultivated, native, and historic plants and animals.

Joan Linder's artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues that included include Kunstahallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark; Gwanjgu Art Museum, the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, and The Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her awards include residency fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell and a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Art in America, and the NY Times. Her most recent exhibition at Cristin Tierney Gallery was written about in New York Magazine. In 2021 she completed a permanent public artwork for the NYC Department of Education’s Public Art For Public Schools PS 97 The Highlawn in Brooklyn. Her curatorial practice includes the 2019-2020 exhibition Hot Spots: Radioactivity in the Landscape, at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries and Krannert Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is Professor of Art at the University at Buffalo SUNY.