Jovi Schnell is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work spans from studio painting to large-scale projects distinguished by vivid color, botanical shapes, and imagined ecologies. Raised in a back-to-the-land community that valued experimentation and nature, Schnell developed a deep connection to the natural world and an eco-poetic awareness. This sensibility shapes her work: exploring flora and the garden as both subject and method, she tends a living archive through paint and collage, weaving recombinant relationships between pattern, system, color, text, and rhythm, rooted in the belief that play is essential to our continued growth and learning.
Inspired by Sister Corita Kent’s idea of PLORK (Play + Work), Schnell created Anything Grows, a creative game framework that introduces play, chance, divination, and collaborative influences into her painting process, workshops, and site-responsive public art projects. She has coined this improvisational, co-creative approach to making work in and with a community and its unique place, Space Gardening.
Schnell is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Award for Painting and has held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, and the De Ateliers studio program in Amsterdam, NL. Her work has been exhibited in many galleries and institutions, including the Stedelijk Bureau Museum (Amsterdam), the Brooklyn Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum, and has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Flash Art, and Art in America.
She holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from UC Berkeley (2017). Her professional experience as an artist/educator includes over 15 years of art instruction at institutions including the California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, CSULB, and the USC Roski School of Art. She has led experimental painting workshops at Anderson Ranch Arts Center and taught intensive summer programs in NYC and Switzerland. She currently teaches within the Los Angeles Community College District.