A Love Puzzle Painting

Joyce Owens' art was comissioned by the historic Blackstone Hotel in downtown Chicago, the Sofitel Hotel in Hyde Park, Chicago, by the Mt. Sinai Hospital Clinic and Chicago State University. She has exhibted on four continents including NATO in Brussels, Belgium; The African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and U.S. embassies in Stockholm, Sweden and Monrovia, Liberia. Her work was also shown in Turin, Italy and many galleries, museums and art centers in the U.S.A. Owens, who has been an artist since she was a girl, was born in Philadelphia, Pa. on the east coast of the United States of America. The third of three children produced by Eloise Owens, a local celebrity/opera singer, and a community and civic servant following in the footsteps of her mother, Owens' grandmother, Florence Collier Franklin, who raised a million dollars in war bonds during WWII. All of her six siblings, and her mother, Elizabeth migrated from Georgia in the late 1920's. My grandmother's husband, college educated and an employee of the US Postal Service, died young when my mother was eight. I never knew my great grandfather or my grandfather and my father and mother split when I was a tiny girl. I lost half of my history. I have tried all my life to grasp my missing history by embracing that of all my people as well as my personal family history. I have learned to embrace what I have and never look back when it comes to things I have lost or never had. I left Philadelphia to create my own history, apart from the glory and the chaos of a prominent black family that also had some issues (like most families). My mother was known by many. My uncle, Jack T. Franklin's impressive half million-plus photography collection covering the civil rights movement in Philadelphia is a national entity. My cousin is a respected historian and has written numerous books. I am inspired by my history and by artists such as Charles White and Kathe Kollwitz. Contemporary artists I love are sculptor Preston Jackson, Elizaeth Catlett, Wanghechi Mutu, Richard Mayhew, Kerry James Marshall, Philemona Williamson, Renee Stout, Barkley Hendricks, Judy Pfaff, Carrie Mae Weems, Richard H. Hunt, Don Gummer, and more. Sculptor Ed Love was my biggest influence along with my high school teacher Walter Lubar.