About Joanne Ross
Joanne Ross is a visual artist living in Nutley, New Jersey, and Equinunk, Pennsylvania. Originally born in Queens, NYC, she followed photography and visual arts as a passion. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Education from Buffalo State College. Following this, she earned her Master’s of Fine Arts in Photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a Master of Science in Art Education from Syracuse University. Joanne also serves on the Artist Advisory Committee at Guttenberg Arts, a non-profit artist residency program in Hudson County, New Jersey. With her artistic pursuits, Joanne has taught photography at the International Center of Photography, School of Visual Arts NYC, Rockland Community College, Ramapo College, and New Jersey City University, as a tenured educator in the New Jersey School System.
Her art looks to observe culture and identity. Through her archival research, photography, installation, drawing, and narrative, she is able examine cultural history, attachment, and places. She takes memories, both real and imagined, and creates poetic social critiques. She reflects on loss, longing, and desire. Taking each work and using it as a scaffold of fragility, hidden emotion, and fleeting moments of time. Ross uses her art to recontextualize narratives, creating new meanings for these items, juxtaposing objects, people, and places.
During her time as an artist, she has received many awards and grants, from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Art Institute of Chicago, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, PBS Art 21, National Endowment for the Humanities and Earthwatch.
Along with this she has been a part of many single exhibitions such as the Nave Museum in Victoria, Texas, the William R. Morrow Gallery at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the Center for Visual Arts, Metropolitan State University and the Anderson Gallery, at Virginia Commonwealth University.
She has also participated in many group exhibitions. A selection of the group exhibitions include ArtHelix in Brooklyn, Forward Union Fair, Exit Art, 92nd Street Y, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, New Jersey City University and MMC at Marymount Manhattan College in New York.
Her photography is also displayed in many different places; Bank of America LaSalle Collection, Visual Studies Workshop Archive, Rochester, New York and other private collections.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“I am an artist/photographer based in the tri-state region of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. My photographs, installations, micro stories, and artist books explore the unseen, sublime, and contradictory nature of societal, cultural, and environmental issues hidden beneath the surface of the everyday and close to home. Themes include climate change, memory, and time. I use my camera as an intuitive tool to document site-specific environments for meaning. In the studio, I alter, group, crop, and sequence select images to enhance and emphasize significant visual narratives of the subject and place. My current project examines the impact of climate change on fragile ecosystems within wetland/riparian zones.”