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.
Jolene Powell
McCoy Professor of Art, Director of Gallery 310 Marietta CollegeArtBio
Jolene Powell is a McCoy Professor of Art, and Director of Gallery 310 at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio. She is an established artist with an extensive exhibition record and is currently represented by Brandt Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. In 2021, Jolene received Marietta College’s Innovative Teaching Award, in 2018, the Edward G. Harness Outstanding Educator Award, and in 2007 the school’s highest honor, the McCoy Teaching Excellence Professorship.
As well as an artist-educator, in her role as Director of Gallery 310, her mission is to work with a variety of campus and community entities to create a space for current and relevant conversations in exhibitions such as “I Embody…” The exhibition title, and concept, stems from Adrian Piper’s 1975 piece, “I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear;” “People of a Darker Hue,” by MacArthur Fellow, Carrie Mae Weems, and “Privilege Audit.”
She has an MFA is from Boston University and a Diversity and Inclusion certificate from Cornell University. In 2023 she served as a juror for the Ohio Arts Council’s Biennial Exhibition at Riffe Gallery, in Columbus, OH, and in 2020 she was featured on the podcast, I Like Your Work. Her exhibitions include Weather Flux, at Reservoir Art Space in Ridgewood NY; Landscapes: Plein Air to Abstraction, Art Access Gallery, Columbus, OH; Natural Expressions, Riffe Gallery, Columbus, OH; Landscape Real and Imagined, Site: Brooklyn Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, and Melange Abstract Invitational, There’s No Place Like Home, Peaks and Pinnacles, and most recently, False Meridian, at Brandt Gallery.
Artist Statement
For the last two years, my landscape painting practice has been grounded in ecofeminism and the conceptual parallel between the oppression of women and the deterioration of the environment. This relationship is visually represented through my recurring motif of water, which functions as both a life-sustaining force and a repository of ecological degradation.
In modern society, we have tried to harness and master water. It has become an object of technological control through systems of extraction, diversion, and containment. My paintings emphasize water’s persistent capacity to resist human attempts at dominion. In each reflecting pool and aqueous surface I paint, water retains its agency: it floods, purifies, nourishes, cleanses, and calms, all without human permission. My work draws a connection between the resilience and generative power of water and the enduring strength of women.
Color is the second element through which I articulate feminist resistance, resilience, and activism in my painting. In Chromophobia, David Batchelor theorizes color as historically positioned in opposition to rationality, structure, and logic within Western visual culture. Arguing that color has been persistently coded as emotional, excessive, sensory, passionate, superficial, or feminine. With my color choices, I intentionally visually fracture that philosophical concept and aesthetic. My palette derives from observed color in the natural landscape, but I deliberately push chromatic intensity to the threshold of visual discomfort with highly saturate compliments and bright hues. My color choices emphatically assert color’s rightful legitimacy as a powerful statement of beauty, power, intellect, sophistication, and the sublime.