JoAnne Carson

JoAnne Carson (born 1953) is an American performer who is known for over-the-top, hybrid works in painting, sculpture and assemblage that freely mix fantasy, illusion and narrative, high and low cultural allusions, and seriocomic intent. She first gained widespread attention in the 1980s for what ARTnews critic Dan Cameron described as "extraordinary painted constructions—kaleidoscopic assemblages chock full of trompe-l’oeil painting, art-history quips, found objects and nostalgic echoes of early modernism." New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote that Carson's subsequent doing progressed systematically into three dimensions, culminating in freestanding botanical sculpture that exuded "giddy beauty" and "unapologetic decorativeness"; her complex imaginary landscapes have been described as whimsical spectacles of "Disneyesque horror." Carson has been official with a Guggenheim Fellowship, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy in Rome and National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo artist residencies. Her accomplishment has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), Albright-Knox Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; it belongs to the public art collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, MCA Chicago, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, among others.