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 relationships among 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 to our continued growth and learning.
Jovi developed Anything Grows, a creative game framework inspired by artist Sister Corita Kent’s concept of PLORK (Play + Work), and incorporated elements of play and collaboration into her painting, her workshops, and her site-responsive public art projects; she refers to this method of creating work within and together with the community as "Space Gardening."
Jovi has been awarded the Pollock-Krasner Award for Painting and has completed residency stays at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, and the De Ateliers studio program in Amsterdam, NL. Her work has been widely shown in galleries and institutions, including the Stedelijk Bureau Museum (Amsterdam), the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and the Berkeley Art Museum. It has been featured 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 intensive summer programs in NYC and Switzerland. She currently teaches within the Los Angeles Community College District.