Jovi Schnell is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her vivid semi-abstract paintings and large-scale murals in institutions and public spaces. Her imagery charts the cosmic interplay of blooming symbolic narratives, hybrid systems, and imagined ecologies. Growing up in a back-to-the-land community formatively shaped her eco-poetic sensibility and connection with experimental culture. Her recent works explore myth, growth, botanical still-life, and the garden as both subject and method; tending a living archive through paint and low-relief collage materials, she weaves recombinant and tactile relationships between the spaces of cut-out shapes, color, surface textures, stencil-work, thread, mark-making, words, and rhythm, all rooted in the belief that play is vital for 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.