Joyce Lyon - Artist Statement

 

Joyce Lyon is an artist whose work centers on the significance of place.  Her media are drawing, painting, digital imagery and artists’ books.   Born in New York, she attended Barnard College and Pratt Institute and received her MFA from the University of Minnesota, where she is Associate Professor in the Department of Art.  She has received fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Jerome Foundation/Minnesota Center for Book Arts and participated in a Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Seminar in Poland.

Recent exhibitions include Otricoli Gardens: Searching for Language at Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis and WARM: Twelve Artists of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota at the Weisman Art Museum. Earlier exhibits include: Dialogue in Place: Joyce Lyon/Andrea Thoma, Bretton Hall College, University of Leeds; Water and Available Light, Groveland Gallery; and Witness and Legacy: Contemporary Art About the Holocaust, a national traveling exhibition organized by the Minnesota Museum of American Art.  With Howard Oransky and Francisca de Beurges Rosenthal, she participated in the traveling exhibition Residue of Silence.

Last year I was able to spend five months in Otricoli, a medieval walled village at the southern tip of Umbria.   As I began to know the places and people of the town --and myself in this new environment, as I explored the narrow streets and sometimes bravely and sometimes tentatively thrust myself into speaking Italian, I attempted to translate my experiences into languages I know better, those of journal and image making.