Invisible Personas

Emanating from a university teaching position in Singapore, artist Joan Marie Kelly navigates an interwoven view of complex community relations with her own status as foreigner by engaging communities with art making. Kelly connects the reader in an intimate visual narrative of lived realities through her paintings and text, immersing the reader or viewer in humanist levels of the world she navigates. She speaks to the global condition, giving it poignancy. Four scholars who have worked with Kelly closely have written essays examining the visual art and developmental processes and have lived interwoven relationships she immersed herself and others. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, a cultural theorist; artist Sarah Schuster, teacher at Oberlin College; Pamela Karimi, an Iranian art historian; and David Cohen, a prominent art critic in New York City, have all written from four distinct perspectives about years of artwork made by an artist deeply involved in the communities surrounding her.