Joanna Pousette-Dart

Joanna Pousette-Dart (born 1947) is an American abstract artist, based in New York City. She is best known for her distinctive shaped-canvas paintings, which typically consist of two or three stacked, curved-edge planes whose arrangements—from slightly precarious to nested—convey a sense of momentary balance with the potential to rock, tilt or slip. She overlays the planes with meandering, variable arabesque lines that delineate interior shapes and contours, often echoing the curves of the supports. Her work draws on diverse inspirations, including the landscapes of the American Southwest, Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalan art, Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy, and Mayan art, as well as early and mid-20th-century modernism. Critic John Yau writes that her shaped canvasses explore "the meeting place between abstraction and landscape, quietly expanding on the work of predecessors" (such as Ellsworth Kelly), through a combination of personal geometry and linear structure that creates "a sense of constant and latent movement."

Pousette-Dart has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and National Endowment for the Arts, and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Brooklyn Museum, among others. She has exhibited internationally, at institutions including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Museum Wiesbaden, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Pousette-Dart is the daughter of abstract-expressionist painter and New York School founding member Richard Pousette-Dart. She lives and works in SoHo, Manhattan with her husband, painter David Novros, with whom she has a son, Jason.