Johanna Poethig is a visual, public artist, and performance artist who has exhibited internationally, creating public artworks, murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations for over four decades. She received the California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award in 2021. Poethig grew up in the Philippines and has participated in Filipino-American artist collectives and Philippines-based arts projects since the 1980s. Storytelling, whether through public art or studio practice, is central to her work, which plays between realism and abstract forms, architectural and intimate scales, collaborative processes and scientific research. She is a bridge between diverse communities in an evolving public sphere, developing methods of communication, conceptualization, fabrication and execution in multiple forms. She draws from science, ancient predictive practices, magical surrealism, and a fabulist futurism to invent new narratives in a time of climate crisis. She has painted historic social, cultural and political murals for urban space. In 2024 she restored her 1984 nine-story landmark mural on Filipino immigration to the Americas which is now part of the Soma Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District.
Other recent public projects are a 25′ x 25′ architectural metal relief for the San Jose Fire Department, a large-scale painting relief installed in Chinook Elementary School in Washington, a 65-foot mosaic for Rainbow Rec Center in Oakland, and the 1.5 million 9-mile public art project for AC Transit. Poething has exhibited at the de Young Museum, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery with the Great Wall of Los Angeles project, Luggage Store Gallery, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Boston Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Center, SF Galeria de la Raza, Headlands Center for the Arts, David Ireland House, Capp Street Project, New Langton Arts, Museo ng Manila among others. She is Professor Emerita at the Visual and Public Art Department, California State University, Monterey Bay.
