JoAnne McFarland is a multidisciplinary maker. The tenet that fuels her practice across multiple genres is her belief that violence and creativity are opposites. She is the Artistic Director of Artpoetica, a project space in Gowanus, Brooklyn that focuses on the intersection of literature and visual art. Her recent multimedia collections include American Graphic, winner of the 2024 Wishing Jewel Prize for Poetic Innovation from Green Linden Press and the 2023 Experimental Poetry Award from the Connecticut Poetry Society; A Domestic Lookbook and Pullman, published by Grid Books in 2024 and 2023 respectively; and Identifying the Body, published in 2018 by the Word Works. McFarland has artwork in the permanent collections of the Cooper/Hewitt Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Department of State, among many others. Beginning in 2019, McFarland has curated the Sally Project with fellow artist Sasha Chavchavadze. Sally is a community-centered project focused on using art to activate the public memory of women, like Sally Hemings, whose lives have been erased or marginalized. McFarland’s artwork is represented by Accola Griefen Fine Art. www.joannemcfarland.com

Psalms of Innocence bears witness to civil rights activist Malcolm X’s assertion: “The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman.” Combining text, painting, collage, and beadwork, the pieces resonate with English Romanticist William Blake’s 1789 magnum opus: Songs of Innocence, where art and poetry also merge. Examining the wrenching, under-recognized history of the lynching of Black women in the United States, and the ongoing epidemic of missing Black women and girls, Psalms of Innocence unearths and honors some of our most vulnerable citizens.

—Winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize for Poetic Innovation—

With candor and insight, American Graphic confronts personal and cultural pasts. Juxtaposing historical documents—recipes from the first cookbook published by a Black woman in the States, reward posters for people fleeing enslavement—with intimate moments from the present, the book's magic is to bend time so we see that the past’s rivers flow through us into the future. Spare yet lyrical in its language, American Graphic is a concentrate of feeling and vision.

Praise for American Graphic

In the slaughterhouse of the nation, the history, the language, JoAnne McFarland writes: “The feather inside me won’t be quiet.” And of the winter: “It could change in a heartbeat, it will change as our hearts are beating.” American Graphic is a field of marks and feelings quite impossible to describe. Minimalist yet dense, a thicket of sparse reckoning out of which beauty is pulled to the surface with muscle and voice, color and hand. Dynamic and exacting, McFarland’s is a brilliant, singular vision. American Graphic is an astonishing work. —aracelis girmay

In American Graphic, JoAnne McFarland brilliantly reassembles the ingredients of this nation’s violent history, finding in the witness of the past profound creative energies of survival. “Every woman has a tongue / Her appetite can be a death sentence,” McFarland writes, yet in this astonishing book about hunger and loss, it is the power of making—in a recipe proudly shared or in the quilt patterns that encoded the paths of the Underground Railroad—that emerges as antidote to a poisonous past. Reproducing found documents and her own heartbreaking collage works, American Graphic brings home the extraordinary powers of word and image assembled in complex, gorgeous dialogue. This book is astounding. In the face of violent unmaking, McFarland’s verbal and visual miracles await. —Elisabeth Frost

JoAnne McFarland’s American Graphic serves us a mesmerizing potion of personal history peppered with documentation of national cruelty and lifted with homage to Black ingenuity and resilience. Festooned with Adinkra signposts and latticed threadwork, McFarland masterfully weaves a call-and-response seam between past and present. Ingredients provided here are ambitious craft, persistent attention to memory, a sensual, fetter-free eros, and a reader willing to emancipate the way they understand poetry. —Tyehimba Jess

When JoAnne McFarland writes “the feather inside me won’t be quiet,” she invites us to see this unfold in her imaginative use of poems, captions, and printed matter from a mid-19th century America that some in this country are eager to suppress. Part artist’s book, part poet’s notebook, McFarland weaves together stories where the tender meets the terrifying, where recipes from the first cookbook by a Black woman press up against advertisements seeking to recover runaway slaves, with their matter-of-fact text, bold fonts and illustrations. American Graphic is a remarkable hybrid by a gifted maker, who, in her poem “The Plate,” shares the utensils and what she has swallowed to find: “the birthplace of my imagination.” —Elaine Sexton

With a deft verbal touch and vivid imagery, JoAnne McFarland continues and deepens her exploration of intimacy and history in her latest collection, American Graphic. Never reductive, with a deceptive simplicity that recalls Emily Dickinson, these poems and images invite the reader into a world both richly satisfying and devastating. A slice of orange, a blackberry, a cluster of cherries, embroidered and beaded in jewel tones, recipes from a mid-19th century cookbook (the first by a Black American), legal notices calling for the capture of runaway slaves, quilt patterns said to help guide them to freedom, and collaged dresses in the spirit of another great NYC artist, Joseph Cornell: all these punctuate poems that speak eloquently of the inner life and the complicated intersection of personal history and History. With its gorgeous interplay of image and word, McFarland affirms the power of creativity and beauty. American Graphic, spanning time and space and identity so powerfully, gladdens the reader.
—Andrea Carter Brown

From American Graphic

• A sample from Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 18

• A review of American Graphic at Frontier Poetry

• A reading from American Graphic, December 11, 2024

• An interview with JoAnne McFarland in the Offing

• An interview with JoAnne McFarland in Five Points