This interview was recorded on May 2, 2025.

Mary Jo Karimnia is an artist, curator, artspace owner and former arts administrator based in Memphis, Tennessee.

She builds rich, highly crafted surface patinas with glass beads, foil and velvety flocking on vintage and contemporary imagery, using these non-traditional art materials to produce an altered view. Her work plays around the edges of nostalgia, imagining beauty and sadness competing in unreal views of an idyllic, miscolored past that never really was and an equally idyllic aching for a future that may never be. A rainbow array of translucent beads may be affected by the color of the surface below and ideas are often deep and hidden in shadows encompassing ancient magic and everyday life.

Karimnia helped to found and is the former Director of the Crosstown Arts Residency Program. Her practice includes a grassroots, behind the scenes activism with priorities elevating diversity and building deep connective fibers between local and nonlocal multidisciplinary artists from a variety of backgrounds. Karimnia co-owns and runs the Studiohouse on Malvern in Memphis, Tennessee which hosts a yearly Studiohouse Openhouse event as well as intimate let’s-talk-about-the-art-world teas. She founded and runs the Front Porch Window Gallery, a small space meant to build community through self curation. It encourages unexpected art encounters by being embedded in a neighborhood and is lighted for viewing day or night.

Karimnia has gallery relationships with Sheet Cake in Memphis, Tennessee RO2 in Dallas, Texas and PURO in La Paz, Bolivia. She has shown in the US and Bolivia and received grants, awards and residencies from ArtsMemphis, Urban Art Commission, and Mackinac Island Parks Commission and her work is in the collection of the Memphis Art Museum. Writing about her solo museum show Fold at Dixon Gallery and Garden Fredric Koeppel said her work “… plays around the fringes of folklore and the transformation of the psyche through the magic of women’s work and the way it impinges on the ordinary.”