Growing to Get to the Light, Bouquet Play - (10)

Jovi Schnell is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her vivid semi-abstract paintings and large-scale murals in institutions and public spaces. Her imagery charts the cosmic interplay of blooming symbolic narratives, hybrid systems, and imagined ecologies. Growing up in a back-to-the-land community formatively shaped her eco-poetic sensibility and connection with experimental culture. Her recent works explore myth, growth, botanical still-life, and the garden as both subject and method; tending a living archive through paint and low-relief collage materials, she weaves recombinant and tactile relationships between the spaces of cut-out shapes, color, surface textures, stencil-work, thread, mark-making, words, and rhythm, all rooted in the belief that play is vital for our continued growth and learning. Schnell holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from UC Berkeley (2017). Schnell is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Award for Painting and has held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, and the De Ateliers studio program in Amsterdam, NL. Her work has been exhibited in many galleries and institutions, including the Stedelijk Bureau Museum (Amsterdam), the Brooklyn Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum, and has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Flash Art, and Art in America.