Ascension Painting

Jim Bliesner is an artist exploring ideas in multiple media. He started with painting and set out to paint the great cities of the world doing Paris, Venice, Jerusalem, villages of China, Mexico, England, Brazil, Turkey and the USA. This odyssey produced over 400 paintings, woodcuts and prints. Searching for dimension in images he built furniture in Baja Mexico. This exploration generated public installations funded by Insite (SD), two grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, and numerous public art grants as well as funding for the work in Havana Cuba at the Havana Biennale of 2000. The California Council for Humanities funded an exploratory film of the US/Mexico border and its minute points of human transmission under the border fence. He has assisted in the production of two documentary films about the work in Baja and Havana. Much of this work was done in conjunction with the cross border art collective RevArte. The Popotla project has been featured in “Art and Social Change: A Reader” by Tate Publishing as well as Public Art Review. He has executed numerous public sculptures in the City of San Diego, the SD Port District and was appointed by the City of Shanghai to jury an international sculpture competition. He recently had a sculpture selected by the City of Shanghai as a finalist for its World Fair exhibit. Writings include numerous presentations at colleges and universities in the US and Cuba about “art and community” as well as two chapbooks entitled “China Odyssey” and a chapbook of poetry “Selling Peanuts to Blue Shirts” He was selected to attend the Coppola writing workshop in Belize and in 2013 did a “arts residency” in Skopelos Greece. His education includes a BA and MA in Philosophy and Ethics from Boston University with art training from the New York Studio School of Painting Drawing and Sculpture. He is currently an instructor in the Urban Studies Department University of California-San Diego and is the Director of the Center for Urban Economics and Design.