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In 1981, Joyce Wellman (b. 1949), a native of Brooklyn, NY, decided to make Washington, DC, her home, where she continues to reside. She received a BA degree from City College of New York in 1972, and five years later she completed the master 's degree at the University of Massachusetts. During the late 1980s, she also studied painting as a graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and during the late 1990s she received the MFA from MICA's Mt. Royal School of Art. She has exhibited her artwork in various art venues including the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens), North Carolina State University Museum Gallery (Greensboro), The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland College Park, Washington's Heurich Gallery (DC), and Kenya National Museum (Nairobi).
Joyce Wellman describes her career in visual art as a journey from printmaking to abstract painting. "My artistic journey began in the early seventies when I was introduced to printmaking," she says,
and worked in various printmaking studios in New York City. There I was mentored by a host of artists in New York City. By 1981 I had relocated to Washington DC, to work and grow professionally.
During the 1970s and early-1980s my concern was discovering a means by which to create an art vocabulary and grammar that included vibrant colors, cryptic marks, shapes and symbols that referenced mathematics, anthropomorphic forms and personal experiences and references to my growing up in a household where "The numbers" were played. I was on a journey to create work in the printmaking medium that became vehicles by which the viewer could journey through contemplative space.
While in the mid-1980s I continued to make prints, my focus turned to painting, mixed media, and drawing. Most important to me of course was the development of my artistic voice as a painter and printmaker. It has always been through abstraction that I have sought to express my feelings. The use of intuition, textures, vivid colors, mark making, and a process-orientated approach aided me in digging deeply into my heart to express myself.