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
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A coastal nostalgic collection of oil paintings celebrating summer, and imagined escapes. Beach scenes, female portraits with florals, and quiet moments explore light, movement, and color. Exhibited 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.
Bio
JM Culver is a contemporary figurative artist, consultant, educator, curator, and writer with more than a 25-year professional career. Working from intimate pieces on paper to thirteen-foot canvases, 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 a gallery director, arts nonprofit director, board chair, and curator, with experience in development, fundraising, teaching, event planning, 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 freelance experience includes design, marketing, communications, original merchandise design, screenprinting, and 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, juried by the then-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 commissions of all sizes, from intimate works to extensive projects.
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Raised in an immigrant family amid the military grit and transient 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.
Bordering between representation and abstraction with provocative paint and charcoal layers, the portraits explore identity by obscuring facial features, revealing the underlying structure, and expressing a sense of raw emotion, while presenting a distorted character of what once-was. The viewer is confronted with an uncertain and unnerving presence of the other, with something almost nonhuman left on the surface.
Using these characters, I recreate narratives that stem from my childhood memories of my grandfather who suffered from schizophrenia combined with the second-hand memories of his surreal story-telling. These reconstructions and personal observations of the human condition present an immediate and intimate, tangible expression of memory while exploring the mundanity, absurdity, gravity, and the humor of life.
My work addresses issues of the transitory nature of memory, the ownership of stories and secrets, and the inconsistency of perspective with mental health and personal identity. I create paintings that have personal significance and create social consciousness to connect and emotionally resonate with the viewer.
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