Joanne Pagano Weber

Studio #5

Joanne Pagano Weber is a visual artist, writer, and performer. She is primarily a painter but her work includes a variety of media in painting, sculpture, and drawing. She is currently obsessed with practicing daily meditative linear abstract compositions generated by her love of the figure. Other work includes ongoing life-size representational figure constructions, and she has reprised a prior theme of the doll, a subject which holds deep and long-standing meaning for her. Alongside these involvements, she creates narrative compositions of invented imagery juxtaposed with found imagery. Her art most typically concerns socio-political issues, more overtly seen in the representational work, but inherent in the abstractions as well.

She is a native New Yorker who has exhibited throughout the tristate area and at NY spaces such as The National Academy of Design, Tribes Gallery, ABC No Rio, Kenkelba Gallery, Tompkins Square Library Gallery, and at Art 101, Brooklyn, and in recent years at Emerge Gallery, 11 Jane St. Art Center, and Newberry Artisan Market in Saugerties, NY, and Green Kill Art Center in Kingston, NY. She has contributed cover art for numerous anthologies and publications. For many years she collaborated with artist Janice Mauro on cross-disciplinary installations, such as Beware of the Year 7000, which include text and combine humor and social critique concerning the ramifications of global warming.

She created the first of many sets for the Alternative New Year’s Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza, establishing thematic set design as an integral part of the yearly East Village event instituted by then boyfriend, now husband, Bruce Weber. Joanne was involved in “The Alternative’s” evolution from the start as a performer, graphic designer, and organizer. She and Bruce began an ongoing new Extravaganza tradition upstate in Ulster County since relocating to Saugerties, NY in 2018. As a visual artist and playwright, she is an avid member of Shout Out Saugerties, a vibrant town arts organization that spans all creative disciplines, and includes activism.

Joanne had a long career as a textile designer in NY and has recently retired from her second career as an adjunct professor of Studio Art and Art History in New York, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and New Jersey, and she taught both subjects at Greenwich House Senior Center in NY.