WHERE BACK WHEN (WBW) // BEHIND THE SCENES WITH JM CULVER
A Year in the Making offers an intimate view into the creative process behind large-scale paintings for a solo exhibition at Gage Gallery in Minneapolis, developed as part of an Artist Initiative Grant project. Produced by Ricardo Berland, Berland Media LLC.
MN ORIGINAL // PBS TELEVISION ARTIST FEATURE​
Artist profile and interview featured segment: Conjured Memories with JM Culver. Featured on MN Original, the television arts series produced by TPT– Twin Cities PBS. Originally aired April 21, 2011.
WANDERLUST // SOLO EXHIBITION PREVIEW
A coastal, nostalgic collection of oil paintings celebrating summer and memory through light, movement, and color. Sensual portraits and shorelines capture quiet, suspended moments and re-imagined escapes. Solo Exhbition at Ditch Gallery, Minneapolis.
ART TO BEAT CANCER COMMISSION & FUNDRAISER
THE MAKING OF FIGHT AND VICTORY
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JM Culver was commissioned to create these paintings as the highlighted feature for the Art to Beat Cancer fundraising event for the Children's Research Institute at SMU in Dallas, Texas. Funded by The Glass Foundation. Produced by Ricardo Berland, Berland Media LLC.
Explore Other Series
- Where Back When (WBW) Pause. Conjured Memories Wanderlust #100Heads Visceral Works -
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Bio
JM Culver is a contemporary figurative artist, consultant, educator, curator, and writer with a professional career spanning twenty-seven years. Working from intimate pieces on paper to larger than life-size works on canvas, she creates experimental paintings and drawings centered on emotive portraits and psychological narratives rooted in the grit of real lived experience.
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Culver holds a BFA in Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and attended Syracuse University in New York for graduate studies. Her professional background encompasses leadership roles as an art gallery director and curator, as well as executive director and board chairman of a nonprofit community organization, alongside extensive experience in development and institutional advancement, fundraising, event planning, education, healthcare, and mental health advocacy.
She has managed a gallery and a building housing twelve artist studios, and led a community arts organization with more than 250 members. Her commercial and freelance work spans creative direction, marketing, digital content and social media strategy, book cover design and interior artwork, merchandising, custom screenprinting, licensing, editorial and creative writing, and strategic business consulting.
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Career highlights include a First Place International Award for painting from the FSU Museum of Fine Arts, multiple Artist Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and exhibiting alongside Margaret Keane in an international exhibition at Bedford Gallery in CA, juried by the editor of Juxtapoz Magazine. Her work has also been featured on MN Original, the television arts series produced by tpt – Twin Cities PBS, and in numerous publications.
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As an independent, full-time professional artist working between Minneapolis and the East Coast, Culver actively exhibits her work, which is held in private collections nationally and internationally. She enjoys collaborating with clients on select private and commercial commissions, from intimate works to extensive, large-scale projects.
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Raised in an immigrant family amid the military grit and transient urban communities of the southern East Coast, Culver currently resides in Minneapolis, where Eve, her Siamese rescue cat, runs the show.
Statement
My paintings explore memory, identity, and the human condition through dramatic character portraits and psychological narratives. Driven by an interest in psychology and an investigation of human behavior, my work draws from personal and secondary memories, real lived experience, and the underlying tensions and fractured perceptions within parallel lives. Storytelling is central to this exploration, fueled by the relentless drive to endure, adapt, pivot, and rebuild an existence.
My childhood was shaped by unstable living conditions amid the military grit of the southern East Coast, in a transient, culturally diverse urban community marked by high crime, violence, and poverty. My grandfather, who lived with schizophrenia and helped raise me, was a central presence. His surreal storytelling and altered perceptions, alongside my own experiences of displacement and uncertainty, were early influences on my work.
Independent and on my own since seventeen, I have continued to develop my work through experiences of caregiving, repeated loss, and cycling upheaval, engaging with themes of mental health, disability, and the ways people navigate circumstances that alter their lives.
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My work ranges from life-size monumental works to intimate paintings and drawings. Moving between representation and abstraction, I build, obscure, erase, destroy, and reconstruct figures through layers of oil paint, charcoal, and mixed media. Facial features dissolve, underlying structures emerge, and gestures carry raw emotion. These characters can hold an uncertain and unnerving presence, with something almost nonhuman left on the surface. Other works celebrate life through sensual, partially obscured figures, coastal nostalgia, suspended moments, and surreal re-imagined escapes to another time and place, incorporating patterns, vintage fabric, and paper.
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These reconstructions and personal observations present an immediate and intimate, tangible expression of experience, exploring life at its brightest and darkest points through its mundanity, absurdity, gravity, and humor. Through allegory and metaphor, my work addresses the transitory nature of memory, the ownership of stories and secrets, and the inconsistency of perspective.
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Steeped in the grit of real lived experience, my paintings give tangible form to stories, tensions, and emotions that resist easy resolution. I create paintings that have personal significance and invite viewers to connect through their own experiences and emotional resonance.
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Resilience, hardship, and grit are neither an aesthetic posture nor a convenient, performative origin story in my work. They are the conditions I have worked through, and continue to work through, long before and beyond their appearance in a painting. My art is my life. My life is my art. Unapologetic and unseparated. Ten toes down. I continue.
