The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2024 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Barbara Miner
University of Toledo, Center for the Visual ArtsArtBio
Barbara Miner holds the position of tenured Professor and Chair in the Department of Art, at the University of Toledo, Toledo, OH. Miner has been a working artist/scholar for 26 years and a full-time, self-employed studio artist producing ceramic tableware for 10 years prior to that time.
Her mixed media sculptures, installation works, paintings and prints, informed by the nexus of human/nature interaction, and the practice of meditative repetition, have been exhibited nationally (Maine to California) and internationally (Sweden and Poland) in over 107 exhibitions.
Most recently, she was a finalist for the Uptown Green Shade Project, Toledo, Ohio, first place award winner for the third international online juried art exhibition of the International Visual Literacy Association, and awarded an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Ohio Arts Council for the 2022-2023 year. She has curated three exhibition events, including a lecture/workshop with the noted Author and Photographer, Rosamond Purcell and the sculptor Dewey Blocksma. Miner has participated in numerous national and international artists’ residencies, from Maine to Poland and Sweden. She has presented at national and international conferences and contributed articles to Ceramics Monthly, Dialogue/Arts in the Midwest, and the journal published for the International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability. Miner has received many internal and external grants in support of her research and art practice, as well as numerous Awards for Excellence/Merit.
Artist Statement
I live in a 15-acre woodlot in an area of Ohio called the Great Black Swamp. I quietly walk the property every day and I am struck by the clash between the speed of the external digital world, and my sanctuary-bubble where the slow and steady reclamation of human-abandoned fields by the natural world continues on relentlessly without my intervention. Poison Ivy, wild strawberries, Virginia creeper, ash saplings and thistle repopulate lawns once wrenched from the rich black Ohio soil. Any tiny space that is left “unimproved” by weed killer or asphalt becomes a complex and layered miniature biome for mosses and insects. I borrow shapes and patterns from nature but rather than duplicate what I see, I strive to create an impression of the rich visual tapestry I experience during my time in nature.
In my studio, I gather together paint and plan a suite of colors to use for a given artwork. I create layers of texture, pattern and color, just like the fabric of the landscape. I cut stencils and respond to each painted layer in turn, both hiding it and revealing it so that there is a potent history of the artwork’s life and process embedded in the DNA of the artwork.
