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.
2025 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Jackie Mantey
Artist & WriterBio
Jackie Mantey is a writer and artist based in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Jackie’s visual art practice includes embroidery, painting, and mixed media. She hand-embroiders new stories onto found and historical photographs — a practice she began in 2016 while in early addiction recovery. Since then, visual art has been a meditative, healing, and joyful act she prioritizes while working as a writer. Her visual art has been exhibited in solo and group shows at Slate Arts Gallery, Fulton Street Collective, and The Latent Space Gallery in Chicago and the Hubbell Street Galleries in San Francisco. Her art has been published in Uppercase magazine and Lover’s Eye Press, among others.
Jackie has worked as a professional writer since 2008, when she graduated from Kent State University with an honor’s degree in Magazine Journalism. She has written about art for nearly two decades, first as an arts feature writer at Dispatch Media in Columbus, Ohio, and now as a remote writer for California College of the Arts. Her creative nonfiction has been published in books by Rustbelt Publishing and Reedy Press, as well as numerous news and creative media outlets including Chicago Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, and The Columbus Dispatch, among others. Her writing has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Press Club of Cleveland’s Excellence in Journalism Awards, including Best in Ohio: Freelance Writer for her portfolio of work in 2014. And in 2021 she was a creative nonfiction finalist in Midwest Review’s Great Midwest Writing Contest.
Artist Statement
Joy is how I express my love. I know the world is rife with pain. But I return again and again to the natural joy I can find in my daily life and the gratitude innate to the experience of joy. The way a leaf looks in the sunlight, the smell of spring, the taste of fresh butter. Joy can also be found in radical honesty about the darkness and the cause and effects of global and personal pain. Joy can come from excavating one’s own anger and bringing it to light. I strive to be fearless when looking at the past and my own experiences, and I want my art to encourage others to do the same. I recognize the most important reason to make art is to feel less alone and to help others feel less alone—to provide perspective to maker and viewer.
I like to use fate as a technique for sourcing my materials. My projects have included using Google image search results for existential queries as the basis for content I then sketch and stitch on to found photographs or my own canvas paintings. “Searching” is a constant, practically unconscious act that recurs throughout every moment of contemporary daily life thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet and, more recently, AI platforms. I incorporate these ideas into my process as a means of situating my work within modern experience and connecting the past to the present — this is the root of perspective and grounds for personal and community growth.
Thread and acrylic paint are my main mediums, and I often employ collage and photomontage techniques in my mixed media artworks. These materials and techniques represent a craft-centered mindset and respect for domestic, working-class identities. Using these elements as the foundation for my practice enables me to at once celebrate, critique, and better understand traditional Americana formations of gender, home, and culture.
In my paintings that have photomontage backgrounds, I source images from the Library of Congress’s public domain of Farm Security Administration photographs. Using Adobe InDesign, I manipulate, layer, and collage these images, print them, and then image-transfer them in a new design on the canvas. Integrating these images through a multi-step, multi-tech layering process helps anchor my work in modern experience — bridging the past with the present, serving as the foundation for both personal and community growth.
My work is tinged by the awareness of the sadness, loneliness, and redundancy of human existence, as well as the joy, love, and curious gratitude that can manifest despite all of the above. In fact, that can manifest because of all of the above.