Bio
John Felix Arnold (b. Durham, NC) is a San Francisco based interdisciplinary artist who makes drawing and mixed media based works on paper, sculpture, and installation. Arnold’s work is the result of combined studio and research practices. Using found and vernacular materials and objects, he complicates and reimagines traditional ideas of landscape, monument, and myth-making that are embedded in the American psyche. He creates a kind of alchemy within the physical and meta-physcial connections that his work offers the viewer. Arnold is inviting the viewer to think about “place” as a point from which to understand the often obscured or silenced stories that make up the histories we come from, and ourselves as a part of a larger interconnected existence.
He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina (U.N.C.) Chapel Hill (25’) and a BFA from Pratt Institute (02’). He has exhibited and presented projects with SFMOMA, Nasher Museum of Art, The Ackland Museum of Art, 21c, B.R.I.C. Arts, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, and Spes-Lab Tokyo. He has been in residence with the Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, Cassilhaus, Greenhut, Duke University’s Rubenstein Artist Program, Peter Bullough Foundation, and The Center for Study of the American South. He has received a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Mellon Foundation Southern Futures Fellowship, U.N.C. Chapel Hill Teaching Fellowship, International Sculpture Center Student Achievement Award, U.N.C.Wilson Library Incubator Award, Duke University Arts Commission, Foundation for Contemporary Arts COVID 19 Emergency Grant, and Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Public Art Grant. His work has been collected publicly by U.N.C. Chapel Hill and Duke University, privately by Hank Willis Thomas and Kai Kai Ki Ki Ltd.
