Jo Wood-Brown is a painter and multimedia artist living and working in Lower Manhattan since 1980. She has formed her practice alongside and continues to collaborate with other artists across disciplinary lines. Her imagery that moves from the canvas, to photography and video, to installation and sculpture, coalesces many points of view around her subject.
Exploring cycles of work poetically and archetypally, her creative output is like a living organism that adapts and shifts across time, culture, and collaboration. With a painter’s sense of eternal time, her forms detach from familiar notions of figure-ground to allow for the interweaving of historical and environmental motifs. Wood-Brown’s work, spiritually and collectively, supports the role of art in culture and the creative expansion of ideas within and beyond the community.
Jo Wood-Brown, raised in Los Angeles, received her BFA at Otis Art Institute where she was taught by Charles White. In 1976, she moved to NYC, continuing her education at Lester Polakov Studio and Forum of Stage Design. Her formative years in New York City were shaped by process artists and the site-specific concepts around PS1 and influenced by her friendships working at The Kitchen among artists seminal to the multi-arts genre. In the 1980’s, she was part of the East Village and later Soho gallery scenes, exhibiting her paintings and installations at International With Monument and Lisa MacDonald Gallery and participating in the Pier 34 installations. For the last 28 years, Wood-Brown has worked closely with Arts for Art, an avant-garde jazz based multi-arts non-profit in NYC, creating works in its annual Vision Festival, notably with musicians William Parker and Rob Brown; poet Fred Moten; choreographers Patricia Nicholson, Miriam Parker, Nancy Zendora and Sally Silvers, and recently with Jean Carla Rodea. In addition, her art has been impacted by artists from the ancient cultures of the Middle East and Egypt; for many years Wood-Brown drew artifacts for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After 9/11, she founded Artist Exchange International to promote a dialog between artists in different countries around situations of trauma and developed InnerCity Projects interdisciplinary environments with Miriam Parker eventually expanding into the Lost Voyage Collective. Her works have been shown at galleries in New York and abroad. Most recently at FiveMyles in Brooklyn and at mhprojects in Ichinomiya, Japan.
