Artist Profiles Artist Profiles

A self-described multi-media artist for more than sixty-five years, Joe Willie Smith was born in Elaine, Arkansas. His family moved from Arkansas to Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the Great Migration. He recalls that during his pre-teen years, his mother would collect chipped white plates from the restaurant where she worked and give them to him to paint. He would paint various subjects, make potholders using loops made from recycled rags and he would create flowers made from magazine pages. His mother would sell whatever he created.

Smith scours recycling centers, fields, alleys and thrifts stores for materials. Repurposing materials as media has been a lifelong pursuit. He believes that recycled materials are embedded with a sense of place, natural and cultural history. He also incorporates steel and concrete in his work using these materials as structural elements as well as the mediums. He notes that he will work with whatever medium necessary–sculpture, painting, photography, sound, performance and installation art–in order to realize his ideas. During the course of his prolific and successful career, Smith has done political graphics for the civil rights movement, owned a graphic design studio, designed information graphics for the media and produced several public art sculptures.

Patricia Bohannon leaves indelible marks on the various art communities of which she has been a part. Born in Chicago, Illinois, she spent two decades in Atlanta, Georgia and now lives in Goodyear, Arizona. She was introduced to the world of art in elementary school and she honed that interest during high school. She graduated with high honors from Chicago State University in 1987. Patricia knew that she would one day be a painter and sculptor and she has been successful creating with paints, glass, fiber clay, ceramic, metal and mixed media over the years.

During her inspiring 60-year career, Bohannon has participated in countless individual and group exhibitions, taught Art in the Chicago Public School system and in the Fulton County Board of Education. The recipient of innumerable honors and awards, she was honored recently as 2022’s Extraordinary Woman of Color during Black History Month and she was featured on ABC15’s well-known program Sonoran Living. A mother of two, she was married for thirty-nine years, has been widowed since 2000 and, at 83 years young, she is not slowing down. Her work currently is on display at Sedona Art Center in Sedona, Arizona.

Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, Shoreigh Williams is known for self-portraiture and for an elegantly morphed, dream-like style. Her experimentation with the scribble texture–mostly using microns and acrylic–has bled its way into a permanent style. She wants her work to take the viewer on a ride of following their intuition. Her influences include her mother Cassandra Hansent and her mentors Antoinette Cauley, Travis Rice, and Ivan Lopez.

Williams believes that “when in doubt, draw it out.” Drawing was a central part of her life as she grew up and she notes that she “drew, drew and drew . . .with no motive. . . “simply because it made me whole.” In high school, Shoreigh began customizing shoes which then led to many other commissions, relationships, and experiences.

Stephen Marc is Professor of Art in the Herberger Institute’s School of Art at Arizona State University and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. In 1998, after twenty years at Columbia College Chicago, Marc joined the faculty at ASU. During Spring 2022, he was honored as the third Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair of Photography at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. Marc received his MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, PA; and his BA from Pomona College in Claremont, CA.

Marc is a documentary/street photographer and digital montage artist who was raised in Chicago, IL and considered Champaign, IL his home away from home. His most recent book, American/True Colors (2020) addresses who we are as Americans from an African American perspective and was a 2021 IPPY Gold Medalist for the Best Book of the Year in the Photography category in the Independent Publishers Book Award Contest. Marc’s three earlier books include Urban Notions (1983); The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience: Street Life and Culture in Ghana, Jamaica, England, and the United States (1992); and Passage on the Underground Railroad (2009). Since 2008, Passage on the Underground Railroad has been registered as Arizona’s first and only Interpretative Program of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom division of the National Park Service.