Josette Urso

Josette Urso is an American artist based in Brooklyn. Her art includes dense, largely abstract paintings and collages, drawings and paintings of land- and urban-scapes, and mixed-media constructions. She reconfigures fragments of her everyday, immediate environment in shifting, multi-perspectival artworks whose assembled quality has been likened to cubist-influenced art. while her landscape and cityscape works from the 2000s have a loose representational style. In her later, more abstract paintings, Urso piles and juxtaposes marks, visual contrasts, coincidences and allusions, creating unexpected leaps of scale, color and spatial orientation. Her work is held in the collections of the Mint Museum, Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, Racine Art Museum, Ballinglen Museum of Art, and Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art, among others. She has exhibited at venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, U.S. Art in Embassies Program, New York Public Library, and Tampa Museum of Art. She teaches at The Cooper Union in New York.

Life and career Urso was born and grew up in Tampa, Florida; her mother painted and her father, a mathematician, played classical guitar.

Urso has had solo exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island (1987), Museo de Las Americas (Puerto Rico, 2001), Gulf Coast Museum of Art (2006), New York Public Library (2011), She has had gallery exhibitions at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts (2000–24) and Kenise Barnes (2009–24), among others. Travel, often made possible by artist residencies, plays a significant role in her work. Her approach is said to focus more on sensation than appearance, capturing in a quick, urgent manner her internal responses to a setting or environment. The original referents in the work—at times visible but often obscure—are sometimes evoked in the titles of individual works or exhibitions. She shared with the latter group tendencies toward irregular formats and edges, decorated frames, and non-traditional materials such as beads, buttons, glitter, wrapping paper, lace, toys and other common objects. that suggested layers of memory and experience and allegories for universal, comic and tragic aspects of life. In works like Twin (1996), she incorporated personal, natural and universal imagery into a grid system, bringing to the fore a new impulse to impose order on chaos; she has applied that impulse most prominently in her body of large, circular collages produced since 1998. Consisting of patterns, colors, forms and figures cut from printed or textured sources, their energized surfaces combine random elements with a more organized, meticulous approach to visual space, arranged around concentric, segmented circles; the collages evoke such things as quilts, mandalas and roulette wheels. At a distance, the collages appear largely abstract, but upon closer scrutiny, they offer visual themes and near-narratives exploring connections between humanity, nature and consciousness (e.g., Seventeen, 2005; Ladybug Ladybug, 2018).

Josette Urso, The Glen Off Crossmolina Road, oil on gessoed paper, 15" x 11", 2000. Collection of the Ballingen Museum of Art.

Plein air landscapes and drawings In the early 2000s, plein air painting and drawing became integral to Urso's art, signaling a shift away from the large mind-gardens and their overt references. She was first inspired to paint outdoors on trip to Patagonia, Arizona and a residency in Ireland—both in 2000. The small, unrehearsed paintings led her to make dense, varyingly abstract pen and paper works of her natural surroundings during a residency in Ireland in 2002. Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) (1996), National Endowment for the Arts/Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (1994), Chenven Foundation (1988), and Art Matters (1988), among others. She has received artist residencies from organizations including the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Camargo Foundation, Loft Nota Bene, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.

Her work is held in the public collections of the Ballinglen Museum of Art, Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano, Grand Rapids Public Museum, Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, Stadt Schwandorf, and U.S. Department of State, among others.