Jonni Cheatwood: Navigating the Unseen Through Materiality and Memory

Jonni Cheatwood is a Tucson based artist known for mixed media paintings that merge abstraction and figuration through sewn canvas, layered surfaces, and charged, intuitive mark making. Drawing on memory, material history, and the unstable space between recognition and anonymity, his work has been exhibited internationally, with solo presentations in Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Shanghai, and Turku.

Cheatwood’s practice moves between intimacy and disruption. Working with sewn canvas, textiles, paint, and heavily worked surfaces, he builds compositions that hold autobiography without collapsing into confession. Faces slip toward abstraction, gestures behave like language, and materials carry their own emotional and historical weight.

Across both figurative and abstract work, his paintings are less about fixed narrative than atmosphere, fragmentation, and recognition. Memory, family, place, and inherited visual culture remain close to the work, but rarely resolve in a direct or illustrative way. Instead, the paintings operate in a space between image and feeling, where presence and obscurity coexist.

Born in 1986 in Thousand Oaks, California, Cheatwood graduated from Arizona State University in 2011. He lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.