About the Artist
For more than twenty years, Jovan C. Speller has been immersed in the slow, researched production of narrative photographic works, short experimental films, and multimedia installations. Though she has worked under many labels — lens-based artist, fine art photographer, multidisciplinary practitioner — at the core of her work is a storyteller and archivist. Her first and truest love is working with film and in the darkroom, experimenting with alternative and traditional photographic processes to create works representative of truth, as she sees it.
Her practice is rooted in explorations of memory and myth-making, the history of the human condition over time, and its impact on and relationship to the land. Through this work, she seeks to illuminate the beauty of deterioration, transformation, and forgetting.
Her work comes from a place of deep looking — patient, accumulative, and unresolved. It is a practice of witnessing, of returning again and again to what is disappearing, what is half-remembered, what resists being named. Less concerned with answers than with the quality of the questions, and the particular kind of attention that living slowly inside a subject can produce.
SELECTED CV
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2023 We Are Seers, Breck Creates, Breckenridge, CO
2022 In Lottie’s Living Room, Eide/Dalrymple Gallery, Sioux Falls, SD
2022 Nurturing, and Other Rituals of Protection, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
2021 Sounds for Survival, Ojai Institute, Ojai, CA
2021 Eulogy, Aspect/Ratio Projects, Chicago, IL
2019 Relics of Home, Gallery St. Germain, St. Cloud, MN - solo
SELECT EXHIBITIONS
2025/26 Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, (co-created film presented) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
2025 Peter Williams: Homegoing—A Call and Response, MCAD Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
2025 Family, A Revolutionary Force, Coliseum Building, Minneapolis, MN
2024 Picturing Parenthood, Anderson Center, Red Wing, MN
2024 We, Pen + Brush Gallery, New York, NY
2023 The Ripening, Pen + Brush Gallery, New York, NY
2023 Momentum, Minnesota Museum of American Art Auction, Saint Paul, MN
2022 A Picture Gallery of the Soul, Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
2022 Carriers of Posterity, Law Warschaw Gallery, St. Paul, MN
2022 Conservatory, The Great Northern Festival, St. Paul, MN
2021 In Her View, Harrison Photography Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
2021 High Visibility, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND
2020/21 Fever Dream, Aspect/Ratio Projects, Chicago, IL
2020 Group Exhibition, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
2020 At This Point...Three Spaces for Contemplation, New Studio Gallery, St. Paul, MN
2019 Ground Zero, New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans, LA
2019 First Shift, Third Shift Gallery, St. Paul, MN
2019 Continuum, MCAD Gallery, Minneapolis College of Art, MN
2019 33 Views, Plus Two, Jon Oulman Gallery, by Second Shift Space, St. Paul, MN
2018 4th Annual Group Artist Exhibition, Lanesboro Arts, Lanesboro, MN
2017Black Quiet, MCAD Gallery, Minneapolis College of Art, MN