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About the artist

Mary Jo Bole

Mary Jo Bole, has made her work in geologic materials, prints and drawing. She is now working on a feature length biographical film about her life, work and an ancestor syndrome titled “Family White Elephants”. It is a Cleveland story augmented by singular family photos, interviews and her family’s Eastside/Westside story. She is currently an intermittent artist-in-residence in the Video/Film lab at the Wexner Center for the Arts beginning in 2016. In 2023 she was selected as an Ohio Film Fellow Award recipient for work on this documentary, supported by The Ohio Humanities Council and The Wexner Center for the Arts. In 2022 Bole had two solo exhibitions, the first with William Busta Projects, Cleveland and the second at the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati. The exhibition at William Busta Projects, titled “The Building is Gone”, revisited her photographs of Cleveland from the mid 1970’s through recent times in pastel time mash ups.

Bole is a widely exhibited artist who has shown her works in the United States, Europe, The Baltics and Russia. Her resources include gallows humor, memento mori, Victorian left-over culture, crumbling post-industrial Cleveland, curious objects and cemeteries, a dose of punk, the gilded age, and put her ashes in Lake Erie. Her website is maryjobole.com. She is an emeritus professor and Academy Professor from The Ohio State University, Department of Art.
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