Jeanne Griffin O'Neil

Jeanne Griffin O'Neil began her career in art as a mural artist with Active Artists, a mural cooperative she helped to form, based in Ames, Iowa. From 1976 to 1980, Jeanne painted over thirty murals with the cooperative. In 1979, Jeanne was a teacher/supervisor for a summer mural project for young teens sponsored by Youth and Shelter Services, Ames, Iowa. From 1980 to 1982, she was a teacher and supervisor for mural projects in Ames Elementary Schools, working with children from first through sixth grade.

From 1999 to 2021, Jeanne taught visual art in the Grand Forks Elementary School System, as an Artist-in-the-Classroom for the ArtWise program. Since 2019, Jeanne has been teaching at the University of North Dakota as the printmaking instructor for the Department of Art and Design.

Jeanne studied printmaking with Robert Hromyak, (1981-1982) at Iowa State University, with Jeannine Coupe-Ryding (presently of the Art Institute of Chicago), Ames, Iowa (1981-1982), and with Kim Fink, (2000-2006) at The University of North Dakota. She graduated with a degree in Honors from the University of North Dakota in the spring of 2006.

Jeanne featured on Prairie Public TV:

Artist Statement

Art is a form of language, a means of communication. The images I make are definitions of time and place; as in the changes of light behind bare trees, the patterns made by prairie grasses and by wind rows against the sky. I am also a folk musician and dancer. My art has similar repeating themes to those in the tunes and dances, things that repeat again and again, going round and round. I began making prints of farmsteads back in Iowa in the early 80's, interested in the combination of past and present co-existing in a place; old barns and buildings being gradually replaced by new structures, old wind rows dying and new ones planted, a sort of human signature on the landscape. However, it was not until we moved here to the Red River Valley, where it is so flat, that I began to see the farm houses and barns, sheds, grain bins, rows of evergreens and cottonwoods sitting on the flat line of the horizon as words, as lines of text. They become a language of human interaction with the land, against the ever-changing page of the sky.

Exhibits

Honors