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 & Writer
Website: Gallery & Shop Website: About & Writing

Bio

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

My materials include embroidered thread, acrylic paint, quilting motifs, and digital collage, embodying a tension between tradition and subversion. These craft-centered elements, long associated with domesticity and working-class femininity, are my tools of defiance. They are chosen with intention: to honor the lineage of women’s labor and to challenge its historic marginalization. My work aims to elevate the so-called ordinary and traditionally feminine (floral embroidery, paper dolls, pastel colors) and imbue them with power.

I’m currently working on a new series of mixed media paintings, titled Promising Mad Woman. In it, I examine fictional women poised on the edge of being labeled “mad.” These faceless figures are paper dolls dressed in contradictions. They occupy an ambiguous space between play and peril. The doll format, with its implications of manipulation and disposability becomes a symbol for how society has shaped, adorned, and ultimately discarded women throughout history. Yet, these painted dolls resist. Their facelessness is not erasure but defiance. They become everyone and no one, slipping from grasp and refusing to be pinned down.

The paintings draw inspiration from the aesthetics of pop art and needlework, using bold color fields and craft materials to blur the boundaries between art and craft. They speak to the stories we tell about women, the labels we give them, and the grace, rage, and strength it takes to rewrite those stories on our own terms.