Joanna Powell Artist Talk
September 27, 2026 at Nature of Things
Tessa Granowski (Nature of Things):
I’m so glad to have Joanna Powell with us here today. She grew up in Dallas, but lives in Helena, Montana, and it’s always nice to bring someone home for something like this.
Joanna, I wanted to start by asking you, is there anything that you’ve noticed about this place that influenced who you are and what you make? What about Dallas is still coming through?
Joanna Powell: Like, everything. I like the smell of the asphalt and diesel here. That’s the smell I miss. And it's funny, I was telling someone, I weirdly miss road construction. Everything about me was formed here. I was 29 when I left. And it's really visceral coming back. We spent so much time here wanting to be cool and coming to Deep Ellum. And I just never left till that age. I just sort of roamed around.
And my dad would always say, want to go on an adventure? That was the preface of everything, even if it was just to go to the junkyard or to the grocery store, so I think about that now when I talk to other people. I ask them, you want to go on an adventure? And, yeah, maybe we just go to the grocery store.
Montana is so different. Like the smell is not right, or it's just different. It’s pine trees and a different kind of dust. I feel like home is such a calling, you know? I feel like we always want to go home, no matter where we travel. And it's such a nice opportunity to call me home.
TG: We are glad to have you back.
*to audience* So, Joanna’s work in this exhibition are the two cat sculptures. One is looking out at you from the shower, and one is sitting perched on top of the refrigerator.
TG (cont.): I also wanted to mention that right when you walk in downstairs, you see all these photos of a clown. That's Joanna. I remembered these incredible photos when I was making the flyer for this show and asked her permission to use them. Can you talk a little bit about where those photos came from?
JP: A good friend of mine that I made in Montana is a photographer (Keha McIlwaine), but she doesn't call herself a photographer. I was like, hey, do you want to go take some photos in Anaconda? It's this dilapidated mining town that's a Superfund site. It has a giant lead smelter. They planted grass on the slag pile. It's depressed in a beautiful way. That’s what I find so much beauty in.
This clown character is my alter ego. You can be anything you want when you put on a mask, and you can feel different things or be who you want to be. So I got dressed up, drove to Anaconda, and posed. A lot of it is about grief. I was telling Tessa, I was like, nobody wants to hear about grief. But within the last 10 years, all of my family has passed beside my siblings.
So now there's this deep alone feeling. I feel like that when I'm this clown. You know, everybody's laughing at you… or maybe they're not laughing with you, kind of feeling. You can't even understand loss until you've actually felt it yourself. A friend of mine, all his parents, everybody's still alive, and I was like, I'll talk to you when your parents, or anybody that you love dearly dies, then we can have a conversation.
The clown is a classic character of tragic-comedy type of things. But it’s funny, when I was dressed up like that, we went to the thrift store at Goodwill in Butte and everybody loved it. They were like, oh my God, you look so good! And I was like, I didn't just come to the thrift store like this! I still haven't even really processed those photos of what they actually mean, but there's more to come with that whole series.
TG: I'm excited to see it. On that clownish note, you've talked about anxiety and also humor before in relation to your work. How does that play into your work and in your studio practice?
JP: I think it's like growing up—that was how my dad coped with a lot of things—humor or making a joke about it. And I now realize that my dad, who was definitely neurodivergent (he was born in 1938, so that was not even a thing then), but the way he would think about things… everything had a different name. A “receipt” was a “recipe.”
He made the world more magical for me and so silly. And I miss that, talking to that person that could be so silly on that level. I think it's genetics or something where you’re just so comfortable with someone. That’s like with the cats, the eyes staring at you and different things like that. I wanted to convey the general anxiety of what it is to be human.
TG: Well, I did want to say that this morning we went by Curiosities, and if you haven't been, I highly recommend going. Right when we walked in, there was one strange object after the next that made me think of Joanna's work—cat clown pillows that you knock down (apparently called “Carnival Knock Downs”), or all these dog and cat figurines that convey some sort of strange emotion… It has got to be a very particular kind of person or group of people who make these things. Do you do you relate to that lineage?
JP: Definitely. And my dad was a junk collector. We'd go dig through trash piles. Dallas has that big trash pickup day where you put all your stuff out. That was when we would drive through the neighborhoods. He would be like, we got to get out early to beat the junker guys! And I would be like, damn... But he found so many beautiful things. A lot of trench art, you know the bullet casings that were made into vases— that's the kind of thing I'm interested in: awkward beauty, or beauty comes from something horrible.
My dad also made crown and bridge work, so our basement was just filled with plaster models of people's teeth. He never threw them away like someone else would. There was just a pile of all of Dallas' mouths. And we'd go down there and mix up plaster and play with it… and my mom had this balloon business in the basement, too.
We would also just eat as much candy as we could consume while we were down there. It was such a charmed but dysfunctional childhood, I guess. Maybe it's the dream, but it's kind of fucked up.
TG: On that note, I would love to point out this artist who isn't able to be with us. He passed away in '93—James “Son Ford” Thomas. He was a folk artist from Mississippi, and I feel very lucky to be showing his work. Some of the teeth that he would put in his skulls and heads were real teeth, and in fact, the folk-art collector who I got these from said that Son Ford would ask him to go get him more real teeth at times. So that was one of their exchanges because he visited Son Ford about six different times, and even made a short film about him, and I thought that was a nice tie-in with your history, Joanna.
TG: You can't come back here until you have more teeth!
So, I did want to ask—How did you end up in Montana?
JP: It was the Archie Bray Foundation. It's a ceramics residency that is internationally known, and it was my dream forever. After I went to graduate school, I wrote a little note that said, “I am going to the Archie Bray Foundation.” So, manifestation is powerful. I spent two years there and had a fully-equipped studio. I have never worked in a studio that was so nice. That’s what brought me there. And then I thought that this place is just really cool. There are a lot of weird pockets and interesting people.
I worked at this little museum called the Holter Museum, and it felt like working at the local gas station. Anybody in town would come in and be like, what do you know! And you would get asked out on dates all the time by strange men, and you're like, no! I don't know why that's not an attractive thing for Montana, but it was entertaining, to say the least. But I've just been there ever since and travel around when necessary.
TG: Joanna and I met in Montana, funny enough.
JP: I think it was meant to be.