Joan Mathews is an artist from New York City. Mathews was part of the Fluxus art movement and guided tours or happenings around the city alongside artists like Alan Kaprow and Nam June Paik. Mathews was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
A press release for her 1976 solo exhibition at Galerie St. Petri in Lund, Sweden, reads:
“In 1974, Mathews painted large monochrome images consisting of several panels hanging in the form of a rectangle. Each panel contained tightly compressed parallel lines drawn in wet paint with the help of a ruler or freehand. Once the line was there, it remained unchanged.
Due to economic and space constraints, Joan Mathews stopped painting in the fall of 1974. After much experimentation with different materials, she found that thick felt-tip pens and thin, cheap paper suited her ongoing investigations well. A razor blade also came into use to give the lines a more interesting surface to glide over.
Accidents with the razor blade occurred occasionally— holes were added to the paper. Sometimes these holes became sole objects of her research, sometimes together with lines and paper. The main colors Joan Mathews uses in these structural studies are black, white, and gray.
She emphasizes that our lives are governed by coincidences, randomness, and that it doesn’t matter what one does, how one tries to control or organize their life or work— chance will always intervene. Joan Mathews prefers to collaborate with coincidences rather than try to eliminate them. This way of looking at her creative process has not been reached hastily by Joan Mathews. For about twenty years, she has struggled in the American art world. From abstract expressionism in the fifties through the Fluxus-happening movement in the sixties, she has now arrived at a visual language that gives the viewer a particularly broad perspective on themselves in a larger context. A meditative depth can be discerned in her works, making the images always seem unfinished. The viewer is encouraged to continue in their own thought paths, and how far they can go largely depends on the person’s own life experiences.”