About the Artist

Joanne Mattera works in a style that is chromatically resonant and compositionally reductive. She has had solo shows in New York City at the Stephen Haller Gallery (1995), OK Harris Works of Art (1996, 2007), and ODETTA Gallery (2019), and exhibits regularly with American Abstract Artists in New York City and elsewhere.

Representation
Joanne is represented by Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, Connecticut, formerly of Larchmont, New York, where her solo, The Silk Road Paintings, took place in May 2015. In Chicago she is represented by Addington Gallery where her first solo show there, Hue & Me, took place in September 2020. In Boston she is represented by Arden Gallery, where her 13th solo with the gallery (and 44th career solo), is taking place March 2025 to celebrate 25 years of a joyous and fruitful association. 

Joanne is represented elsewhere around the country: in Atlanta by the Marcia Wood Gallery; in Denver by Space Gallery; in the Bay Area by Adler & Co. Gallery; and on Cape Cod where Looking Sharp: A Retrospective of Chromatic Geometries, a solo at Miller White Fine Arts took place in August 2022. Joanne also enjoys associations with Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York City, and Projects Gallery, Miami. Exhibition installations from  many of these venues are viewable here. 

Collections
Joanne's work is in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Connecticut College Print Department, New London; University Collections at the University of Albany, New York; University of Tennessee, Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture; Wheaton College, Norton, Mass.; the U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C.; and corporate and private collections internationally.

Writing and curating
In addition to her studio practice, Joanne writes regularly and curates, both online for her blog and in physical venues. Her memoir, Vita: Growing Up Italian, Coming Out, and Making a Life in Art and Italianità: Contemporary Art Inspired by the Italian Immigrant Experience, a collection of the art and essays of 59 artists from throughout the Italian diaspora, were published by Well-Fed Artist Press, New York City, in 2019 and 2023 respectively. Through her Joanne Mattera Art Blog she reports on exhibitions and art fairs in New York City, Miami, and elsewhere.

Curatorial projects in physical spaces include Luxe, Calme, et Volupté: A Meditation on Visual Pleasure in 2007 for the Marcia Wood Gallery; Textility in 2012 at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, with the institution’s curator, Mary Birmingham; projects at the Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown in 2011 and 2012; A Few Conversations about Color at DM Contemporary in Manhattan in 2015; and Depth Perception in 2017 at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, Massachusetts, which she curated with Cherie Mittenthal in conjunction with the 11th International Encaustic Conference.

The online project Italianità inspired Italianità, the book, which in turn inspired a series of exhibitions in academic galleries within the Northeast. The first exhibition, A Legacy of Making, co-curated with Joseph Sciorra for the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in Midtown Manhattan, ran for six months in 2023-2024. Three successive exhibitions were curated by Mattera herself. All carry the same title, A Legacy of Making, with specific subtitles acknowledging a varying roster of artists drawn from the book. Venues include Connecticut College, New London, 2024, and Regis College, Weston, Massachusetts, where Part 1 took place in 2024 and Part 2 will open in February 2025. Each exhibition is noted here, with a link to a full walk-through for each show.

Joanne is the founder and director emerita of the International Encaustic Conference, an event devoted to a contemporary medium with a historic past. Relatedly, she is the author of the preeminent book on encaustic, The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (Watson-Guptill, 2001).

Joanne divides her time between Manhattan and Massachusetts.

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