Mj Viano Crowe creates intricate paper cuts, mixed media paintings and installations, photographic assemblages, light box shrines and artist books, where representations of the female figure perform on the various stages she creates. Within their private universes, her subjects reveal little about their actual inner selves. Often orbiting the background is a complex arrangement of ephemera from birds and insects, to flora and fauna, suggesting an extension of the figures’ intricate, emotional worlds.

In 2019 - 2020 Viano Crowe’s 8’H x 20’L photographic mural, RELIQUARY, was exhibited at the DeCordova Museum in Massachusetts.  In 2021 her accordion book, “Mother Nature Holds Her Breath”, was in the international exhibition, Reclamation, at the San Francisco Center for the Book, and in 2022 at the Decatur Arts Alliance, Georgia in The Book As Art.  Included in numerous museum collections, including the Polaroid International Collection, Bokartas Arts in Lithuania and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Viano Crowe received a 1995 National Endowment for the Arts in Photography, and a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship in 1987.
 
Maryjean’s work is also featured in many books including “Step-by-Step, A Guide to Building Pictures”; “Altered Books & Collaborative Journals”; “Writing on the Body; Method Meets Art; and “The Complete Book of Alternative Processes, Editions I & II”.
 



DETAIL: Intuitions of the Spirit, Mixed Media Gallery