After a long career as a landscape painter, my current body of work explores all aspects of the subject I have alluded to my entire career: the spiritual, political, magical, and beautiful. In 2025, I see any person working with the landscape as a documentarian and political artist, for nature is ever-changing at the hands of humans. The places where we find respite and inspiration are affected by storms, overpopulation, deforestation, and other environmental, climate change issues. Since my first landscape paintings, I have always selected places directly touched by climate change and/or places with active programs to minimize human impact on the environment. With this body of work, rocks are a metaphor for the fixed and rigid. The fixed, immovable problem of climate change that has been scientifically proven again and again but still isn’t widely accepted by voters and lawmakers. I believe we are too late, past the precipice, that if we immediately stopped everything that causes greenhouse gases to heat our environment the momentum of climate change would not end: the fixed and the rigid, the immovable, and heavy. I choose not to visually catastrophize the landscape, but to honor its fragility with representations of beauty, for that is what connects our human experiences. Beauty is universal, and for me, indicative of the spiritual. If the moon rises and sets, I will set intentions and express gratitude for the guidance it has provided not just me but many humans across spiritual paths for millennia.
Jolene Powell is a McCoy Professor of Art, and Director of Gallery 310 at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio. She is an established artist with an extensive exhibition record and is currently represented by Brandt Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. In 2021, Jolene received Marietta College’s Innovative Teaching Award, in 2018, the Edward G. Harness Outstanding Educator Award, and in 2007 the school’s highest honor, the McCoy Teaching Excellence Professorship. As well as an artist-educator, in her role as Director of Gallery 310, her mission is to work with a variety of campus and community entities to create a space for current and relevant conversations in exhibitions such as “I Embody…” The exhibition title, and concept, stems from Adrian Piper’s 1975 piece, “I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear;” “People of a Darker Hue,” by MacArthur Fellow, Carrie Mae Weems, and “Privilege Audit.” She has an MFA is from Boston University and a Diversity and Inclusion certificate from Cornell University. In 2023 she served as a juror for the Ohio Arts Council’s Biennial Exhibition at Riffe Gallery, in Columbus, OH, and in 2020 she was featured on the podcast, I Like Your Work. Her exhibitions include Weather Flux, at Reservoir Art Space in Ridgewood NY; Natural Expressions, Riffe Gallery, Columbus, OH; Landscape Real and Imagined, Site: Brooklyn Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, and Melange Abstract Invitational, There’s No Place Like Home, Peaks and Pinnacles all at Brandt Gallery, and recently All Ohio, April 26 – July 2, 2025 at Riffe Gallery.