Jo Wood-Brown has been a SoHo resident for over four decades. Watching Canal Street repeatedly excavated and rebuilt has inspired her latest large-scale dream work, Excavations of Canal Street, a multimedia exploration of recovered histories and imagined futures.
COCO-MAT SoHo is thrilled to celebrate Jo’s contribution to the neighborhood and the city through Dreaming Woman, a six-week in-store exhibition created in collaboration with the artist. Ahead of the opening, we spoke with Jo about creativity, dreaming, land, and the experiences that continue to shape her work.
• Jo, how did you first discover creativity, and what led you to your current artistic perspective?
One of the first things that comes to mind is drawing directly on my television set in my twenties. I felt an urgent need to respond to the world as it was coming at me, that exchange between the inner and outer world has stayed with me and continues to live in my work and films.
I feel that my work is about finding structures that can hold creativity as it moves into the wider community. I want ideas that can be interpreted in many ways, yet remain substantive enough to withstand reflection and scrutiny.
• How did your exploration of “painting to black” begin?
In my twenties, I had a studio visit from Edwina Orr, a restorer of Old Master paintings in London. At the time, I was deeply interested in archaeology; layers, excavation, and the idea of building meaning over time.
I became fascinated by how depth could be created without using black at all, through layered pigments and glazes. That process, of building slowly, layer by layer, became central to my work. It also mirrored a broader curiosity I had about global perspectives, spirituality, and how cultures regenerate and reinterpret themselves over time.
• What do dreams mean to you?
Dreams are one of the deepest forms of guidance. Like paintings, they exist outside of time. They can draw from ancestors, daily life, memory, or collective experience. When I begin to understand them, they offer grounding and clarity…a sense of direction.
• Tell us about your film “The Origin Myth of the Dreaming Woman”.
During the Covid period, I was invited to create an installation at a space called FiveMyles. Rather than presenting paintings, I was challenged to create something immersive. That invitation led me to bring together multiple strands of my practice for the first time. The film grew from painted images that were later transported to sites such as Monte Albán and Chichén Itzá in Mexico, offered as gestures of respect to places shaped by generations before us. The process was intuitive and spontaneous, allowing the work to evolve organically. Around the film, sound, poetry, movement, and performance came together through collaborations with musicians, poets, dancers, and longtime creative communities. Dreaming Woman became a shared experience, a community of dreaming.
• Your work often explores the relationship between land and people. How did the story of Collect Pond influence you?
In the 1980s, I worked alongside archaeologists excavating lower Manhattan. Through this work, I learned the layered history of Collect Pond and how the original landscape shaped the city we know today.
To truly feel at home in New York, I needed to understand my place within its land and history. Collaborations with dancers and performers helped me explore that relationship, how time, movement, and memory intersect, and how a sense of home is formed.
• Tell us about the object you brought back from Greece.
On the island of Tinos, I found a woven vessel in a small antique shop. I couldn’t explain why, but I knew I needed it. Objects like this accumulate meaning over time, they gather stories and quietly become part of a larger whole!
• What is your dream for this exhibition?
Collect Pond was once a biodiverse landscape, and the people who gather here today reflect that diversity. Connecting people back to land, emotionally and imaginatively, has become central to my work, especially in relation to environmental and social realities. There is a moment when something imagined becomes real. This exhibition lives in that space, where dreaming, sensing, and lived experience converge.
• What do the Strawberry Fields in Santa Maria, California, represent for you?
Labor has always felt beautiful to me, working with hands, with soil, with raw materials. The fields became a metaphor for fertility, care, and unseen lives.
Dreaming Woman was born from a desire to understand lives and dreams beyond my own, and from the belief that imagination allows us to cross distances, geographical, emotional, cultural…
Dreaming Woman
An immersive exhibition celebrating the cultural impact of Jo Wood-Brown
Created in partnership with COCO-MAT, Jo Wood-Brown, and dreamers worldwide!
Opening Celebration
Sunday, February 1st
Noon-6 PM
COCO-MAT SoHo
472 Broome Street
RSVP: [email protected]
About the Artist:
Jo Wood-Brown is a painter and multimedia artist living and working in Lower Manhattan since 1980. Her practice spans painting, photography, video, installation, and sculpture, often unfolding through long-term collaborations across artistic disciplines.
Working poetically and archetypally, Wood-Brown’s creative output evolves as a living organism—shifting across time, culture, and community. With a painter’s sense of expanded time, her work moves beyond traditional figure-ground relationships, allowing historical, environmental, and spiritual narratives to intertwine.
Raised in Los Angeles, Wood-Brown earned her BFA from Otis Art Institute and continued her studies in New York at the Lester Polakov Studio and Forum of Stage Design. Her formative years in NYC were shaped by process-based and site-specific practices, as well as her involvement with interdisciplinary art spaces such as The Kitchen, PS1, and the downtown and SoHo gallery scenes.
For nearly three decades, she has worked closely with Arts for Art, an avant-garde, jazz-based, multi-arts non-profit in New York, contributing to its annual Vision Festival through collaborations with musicians, poets, choreographers, and performers. Her work has also been deeply influenced by ancient cultures of the Middle East and Egypt; for many years, she drew artifacts for The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Following 9/11, Wood-Brown founded Artist Exchange International to foster dialogue between artists across countries affected by trauma, and later co-founded InnerCity Projects and the Lost Voyage Collective. Her work has been exhibited widely in New York and internationally, most recently at FiveMyles in Brooklyn and mhprojects in Ichinomiya, Japan.