Jonah Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist and craftsman living and working in the Hudson Valley. His drawings, paintings, sculptures, and furniture, all of which take a cue from folk art and faux naïf, are rooted in Meyer’s background as a woodworker. His artmaking is a semi-autobiographical practice that simultaneously explores themes of American identity, storytelling, and masculinity through narrative and the repurposing of symbols of Americana.
Born in 1969 to two Rhode Island School of Design graduates who turned to homesteading, Meyer witnessed his parents create a rural Pennsylvania life out of their respective crafts and was granted all-hours access to his father’s woodshop. Encouraged to make whatever, whenever, he continued his studies of the arts at RISD and in Europe, where he began painting under the influences of Donald Baechler, Phillip Guston and Paul Klee. Meyer became fascinated by the symbols and decorations that adorned ancient buildings he saw as a student in Rome, and he brought both Baechler’s obsession with the motifs of daily life and the Romans’ tendency to signpost into the paintings and sculptures of his post-grad years. Today, Meyer continues to use cartoonish symbols as a means of self-inquiry and portraiture, many of which hearken back to the complexity of his Pennsylvania upbringing: hearts, skulls, rainbows, water droplets, sunbursts, and guns (which Meyer promptly received for his thirteenth birthday).
“I have pretty normal dark being human stuff, and how I dissolve that is through this almost playfulness…. I just feel these things and I’m like ‘Oh, I gotta get outta here.’ With art, I think it’s just a normal thing to try to deal with that- and the thought happens much later like ‘what even are these things?’ I don’t try to figure it out while I’m doing it, it’s like this machine I’ve made to get me out.”
Equal parts exploratory, therapeutic and compulsive, and akin to the doodles drawn in a high schooler’s history notebook, Meyer’s artmaking is driven by an intrinsic creative impulse. Meyer’s faux naïf symbols and drawings ramble across surfaces and, though seemingly ingenuous, are a vehicle to process and reconcile his rejection of a culture that continues to define masculinity in terms of dominance and violence, while also acknowledging that this history of racism and land theft is a lineage to which he belongs. The ever-playful and thoughtfully-repurposed symbols of American masculinity, history and pride act as a way of negotiating and attempting to reconcile his place in a country that has moments of its history that are as egregious as they are glamorized.
Meyer is a student of history, and spends much of his time reading, researching, and pondering about the impact of American manifest destiny and the flagrant transgressions against the Native peoples, and how nostalgic visions of the American west rewrite and romanticize the history and bloodshed that occurred. “I start to work on my imagination by dealing with these problems. I bring things back into my own territory: ‘Why do I do the things I do?’ I’m tired of the same cycles of thoughts and patterns, so I’m interested in how to unpack and how to change that, and I don’t know how.” His self-re-education is both an important part of his life, and a vital part of his artistic practice. “To me, that is the reconciliation, to actually know these peoples’ stories.”
Jonah Meyer has created his own version of sustaining life through art. Meyer has self-produced shows of his own work for over two decades. He has also been featured at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art highlighting emerging artists from the Hudson Valley. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Architectural Digest, Vogue, Elle Decor and Wallpaper. Among the champions of his work is Martin Puryear, along with the countless artisans and craftspeople with whom Meyer collaborates through his furniture and fine goods company, Sawkille Co. Meyer lives and works in Rhinebeck, NY.