about

Joy Amina Garnett received her BA in Humanities from McGill University, where she studied classical Arabic at the Institute of Islamic Studies followed by a summer intensive at the American University in Cairo. She received her formal training as an artist at L’École nationale superiéure des beaux-arts in Paris and completed her MFA at The City College of New York. Over the years, her focus shifted to creative writing. Her stories have appeared in ellipse, Nashville Review, Evergreen Review, Two Coats of Paint, Rusted Radishes (American University of Beirut), Ping-Pong (Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur), Full Blede (Los Angeles), Statorec (Berlin), and The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books, 2016). American Book Award recipient Gary Gach characterized “Life Drawing” (Evergreen Review, 2022) as “vivid scenes of a vital life-in-progress.” Lambda Literary Award finalist Jee Leong Koh described “Leaving New York” (Evergreen Review, 2020) as “an ode to a vanished New York… interwoven with a lost city are the lost people, the lovers, the neighbors, the artists, the diners, the cars. And when you conclude that you are not sad at all to leave New York, what New York has become, you stab me in the heart.”
Garnett has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Atlantic Center for the Arts, iCommons Dubrovnik, and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA). Her paintings, collages, and artist books have been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, FLAG Art Foundation, EFA, Artists Space, Smack Mellon, White Columns, Center for Book Arts (all in NY), Milwaukee Art Museum, Bristol Art Museum (RI), Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland (OR), Roger Williams University (RI), Boston University Art Gallery, Savannah College of Art & Design, Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University, Illinois State University Galleries, The Smithsonian, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), The Wellcome Trust (London), and Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium). She has received grants from Anonymous Was A Woman, United States Artists, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Chipstone Foundation, and The Wellcome Trust (UK). Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Altria, the West Collection, and in numerous private collections. Garnett has served as Art Director for Evergreen Review since 2019. She lives in Los Angeles and is writing a family memoir.
Garnett began writing for artnet magazine in 1999 while working at the Robert Goldwater Library, part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Her artnet column “Into Africa” covered exhibitions of contemporary and tribal African art. She was represented by Debs & Co. Gallery in Chelsea from 1999 until the gallery’s closure in 2004. During this period, she served on the board of the non-profit advocacy organization Visual AIDS and was a recipient of grants from Anonymous Was A Woman and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. From 2005 to 2016, she served as Arts Editor for the Duke University Press journal Cultural Politics, for which she solicited and edited essays by contemporary American and Canadian artists, exposing their work to the journal’s broad international scholarly readership.
Garnett has written about painting’s relationship to photography, technology, and media for Harper’s; Intelligent Agent; Journal of Visual Culture; Theory, Culture & Society; and in her column on fair use and copyright for Art21 Magazine. Her writings on these subjects have been included in Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network, edited by Jordan Crandall and Amy Scholder (Eyebeam/DAP, 2001); Under Fire: The Organization and Representation of Violence (vols. 1&2) edited by Jordan Crandall (Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2004, 2005); Vertov From V to A, edited by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn (Ediciones la Calavera, 2008); Myself: A Conversation about Self-Portraiture, with Mira Schor (University of Nevada Reno, 2011); Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies (Polity, Cambridge UK, 2011); Virilio and Visual Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and The Virilio Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
In 2008, Garnett’s focus began to shift to her Egyptian background and the life and work of her late maternal grandfather, the romantic poet and bee scientist Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955). Preserving the extensive amount of materials she discovered and rescued from deceased family members, Garnett began building what became the Abushady Archive. She was interviewed about this long-term project in ArabLit Quarterly, Hyperallergic, and 3 Quarks Daily, and has contributed essays about its progress to Arab Urbanism Magazine, Ibraaz, and Baraza. Garnett has presented papers about the archive at several conferences, notably the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW); Middle East Studies Association (MESA); Middle East Librarians Association (MELA); Asian/ Pacific/ American Institute at NYU; and most recently at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Library, which acquired the Abushady Archive in April 2020. Garnett’s chapter summarizing her research about her grandfather was included in Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World: Arts, Thought, and Literature, edited by Anthony Gorman and Sarah Irving (I.B. Tauris / Bloomsbury, 2020).
Archive projects: thebeekingdom.art abushadyarchive.com
Contact: joy.garnett [@] gmail.com
Instagram:  @joygarnett