Joetta Maue

Joetta Maue is a multi-faceted artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally with museums and galleries including; the Arts Complex Museum, San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design, San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, MK Gallery & Institution in Britain, Griffin Museum of Photography and the Masur Museum of Art. Maue’s work has shown in New York, L.A, San Francisco, New Orleans, Washington D.C., Boston, London, Edinburgh and Tokyo and institutions such as Harvard University, Arizona University, University of Rochester, Lesley University and Tufts University. Maue has been an invited lecturer and/or instructor at numerous esteemed institutions including New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study, The Japan Society Museum in NYC, Fuller Craft Museum, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Her work and critical writing have been featured in numerous books and journals including Textile Portraits; Peoples and Places in Textile Art,  Indie Craft, PUSH Stitchery, Fiber Arts Now Magazine, Martha Stewart Living and the Surface Design Association Journal. She is a Lecturer and an invited instructor at a number of programs and institutions across the country.

Joetta lives in New England with her family.

As an act of sustained meditation on the sublime within the everyday I make work inspired by the banal and its coexistence with the profound. As I search to find answers to the unanswerable questions what I do find is a world full of light and dark, sound & silence, intimacy & loneliness, and joy and sorrow collaborating in union with each other. Everything sits inside of nothing, this is what I seek, question, and investigate.

My major bodies of work have explored: the daily intimacy & the space that can exist between lovers, the locale of the bed, the repetition & objects of parenthood, the psychological landscape of the domestic space and the form of prayer found in the dust of our homes. My image-based work explores the physical space and experience of these relationships while my text-based works explore the complicated emotions that reside within intimacy, identity & the questions of human existence. My studio practices involve labor-intensive techniques that force me to work slowly, meticulously, and daily on the work- the finished work becomes a map of a daily meditation on these subjects. Though the autobiographical drives the work and is necessary for it to exist, ultimately it is transcended, enabling the viewers to have their own independent relationship to the work. 

The work on view as part of “Through the Dreamhouse” at Brea Gallery is from a body of work called “Sleepers” in this body of work I investigate the liminal and often forgotten space of the bed. Exploring the relationships and intimacy that occur within this domain of the domestic landscape – these relations move from joyful to lonely, expressing deep intimacy to deep loneliness and into the act of longing. Longing for each other and for our own selves.