VITAE

Joy Amina Garnett is an artist and writer from New York. Her paintings explore media consumption and the distinctions between documentary versus fine art image making. Her creative writing engages memory and dislocation, archives, and alternative histories. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Education: Garnett studied English literature and Arabic at McGill University and the American University in Cairo. After graduating from McGill with a BA in Humanities, she studied painting at L’École des beaux-arts in Paris, returning to New York to complete her MFA at City College.

Fellowships & awards: In 2024, Garnett was awarded a writing fellowship at Yaddo to work on her forthcoming book, The Bee Kingdom, an excerpt of which was Longlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Other honors include the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, residencies at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Creative Commons Dubrovnik, and grants from United States Artists, Therese Ralston McCabe Connor Fund, Chipstone Foundation Milwaukee, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Wellcome Trust (London, UK).

Creative writing: The Bee Kingdom is Garnett’s first book. Weaving together memoir with fragments of historical fiction, it follows Garnett’s search for her late maternal grandfather, a central yet elusive figure of Arabic letters. Garnett’s short stories and excerpts can be found in Rusted Radishes, ellipse: journal of translation, Nashville Review, Evergreen Review, Ping-Pong, Halfway Down the Stairs, Two Coats of Paint, Full Blede, The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books, 2016), and elsewhere.

Archives: Drawing on ephemeral materials she rescued and organized as an archive, Garnett first developed The Bee Kingdom as an interdisciplinary project (documented at thebeekingdom.art). She has been interviewed about this work in ArabLit Quarterly, Hyperallergic, and 3Quarks Daily, and her essays about the archive have appeared in Arab Urbanism Magazine, Ibraaz, Bee World, and Baraza. 

Editing: Garnett has served as the Art Director of Evergreen Review since 2019. Previously, she was art editor and co-editor of the scholarly journal Cultural Politics, published by Duke University Press. While on the board of the arts advocacy organization Visual AIDS, Garnett launched and maintained its first blog and electonic newsletter. She created and edited the entity known as NEWSgrist.

Art writing: Garnett launched “Into Africa” (1999-2001), a regular column for artnet magazine, while working at the Robert Goldwater Library in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. She has also written extensively about painting’s relationship to photography and media, most notoriously in Harper’s, as well as in Intelligent Agent, Journal of Visual Culture, and her column for Art21 Magazine. Her essays can be found in books and exhibition catalogs that include Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network edited by Jordan Crandall and Amy Scholder (Eyebeam/DAP, 2001); Under Fire: The Organization and Representation of Violence edited by Jordan Crandall (Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2 vols. 2004; 2005); Vertov From V to A, edited by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn (Ediciones la Calavera, 2008); Myself: A Conversation about Self-Portraiture, a conversation with Mira Schor (University of Nevada Reno, 2011); M/E/A/N/I/N/G (25th Anniversary Issue) edited by Mira Schor and Susan Bee (University of Pennsylvania and Duke University Press, 2011); Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies (Polity, Cambridge, 2011); Virilio and Visual Culture, and The Virilio Dictionary, both published in 2013 by Edinburgh University Press.

Exhibitions: Garnett’s first solo exhibition of paintings was held in 1999 at Debs & Co. in New York’s Chelsea district. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, Whitney Museum of American Art, FLAG Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Artists Space, Smack Mellon, White Columns, Center for Book Arts, New York Academy of Sciences (all in New York), Milwaukee Art Museum, Bristol Art Museum, Roger Williams University, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, Boston University Art Gallery, Savannah College of Art & Design, Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University, Illinois State University Galleries, Smithsonian traveling exhibitions, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), Wellcome Trust (London, UK), and the Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium).

Collections: Garnett’s paintings are held in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), Altria Group (Richmond, VA), West Collection (Oaks, PA), and in numerous private collections.

Press: Garnett’s paintings have been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, New York Magazine, Harper’s, Perspecta: Yale School of Architecture Journal, Time Out NY, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, artnet, Hyperallergic, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Stranger, Musée Magazine, The Huffington Post, WIRED, Cabinet Magazine, C Magazine, New American Paintings, and Bidoun.

Contact: joy.garnett [@] gmail.com