To Harden and Heal: Jodi Hays

9 May - 28 June 2025
  • Jodi Hays

    TO HARDEN AND HEAL

  • Atlanta, Georgia — Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present To Harden and Heal, our first solo exhibition of works by Jodi Hays, an Arkansas-born, Nashville-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice mines painting, poetry, reclaimed materials, and rural crafts. Opening Friday, May 9, the exhibition focuses on the last five years of Hays’s work—a period marked by a deepened transformation of everyday materials, especially cardboard and textiles. Her process is tactile and slow: surfaces are dyed, sewn, collaged, and weathered. The labor shows. These aren’t paintings in the traditional sense, but dense, built objects—at once tender and exacting.

  • Many of these materials begin submerged—literally. Cardboard is sunk into dye baths, pulled out, dried, pressed, and then collaged into larger compositions. The dye brings out the corrugation and structure of the cardboard itself—its ribs and flutes, the hidden skeleton of packaging—while the artist’s hand imposes rhythm and order through stitching and layering. The results are neither flat nor entirely sculptural. They hold a skin-like tension: rigid but yielding, patched but complete. These hybrid forms—what she calls constructions—evoke the visual language of quilt-making, printmaking, and weather itself.

  • Though the works are grounded in Southern material culture, they push outward, refusing nostalgia or regional cliché. The detritus is specific—drawn from the South—but the gesture is broader, more American. These are the leftovers of a place and a people, reformed and re-seen through the lens of abstraction. Hays doesn’t illustrate the South; she distills it, making room for contradiction and nuance, irony and affection.






  • Jodi Hays, Doubting Thomas. 2025

    Jodi Hays, Darkest Hour. 2022

    Jodi Hays, Apple Bottom. 2025







  • Jodi Hays, Dog Ear. 2024

    Jodi Hays, Opening Day. 2025

    Jodi Hays, Doubting Thomas. 2025


  • To Harden and Heal points to a dual movement in the work: a hardening of soft materials through time, labor, and process, and a healing – a marriage of histories through transformation. These pieces speak a global language of abstraction, but with an unmistakable accent—drawling, inventive, and unshy about color or surface. Somewhere between Gee’s Bend and Ruscha, Bradford and Johns—inflected by Southern poetics and a restless experimentation, Hays carves out a space that is distinctly her own.






  • Jodi Hays, Pentecost. 2025

    Jodi Hays, Doubting Thomas. 2025







  • Jodi Hays, Pentecost. 2025

  • Pentecost by Jodi Hays constructs a towering work from dyed cardboard, ribbon, denim patches, and cyanotype, evoking both the scaffold and the sanctuary. Named for its verticality and quiet reverence, the piece channels a ritual intensity—where labor becomes liturgy and material transforms into metaphor.

  • Canaan hovers between figuration and abstraction, suggesting something animal-like—part gesture, part silhouette. Its ambiguity is intentional, inviting multiple interpretations rather than a fixed reading. The composition holds a charged stillness, balancing expressive energy with quiet restraint.

    The title evokes the layered symbolism of a promised land—historically and spiritually loaded, both longed for and contested. Here, Canaan becomes less a place and more a proposition: about where we come from, what we carry, and how we define home in shifting terms.

  • About Jodi Hays

    About Jodi Hays

    Jodi Hays is a Tennessee-based artist whose work explores the material vocabulary of painting filtered through visual habits of the American South. She has exhibited her work at galleries and museums across the United States including Corcoran Gallery of Art, Brooks Museum of Art, Cooper Union, and Boston Center for the Arts. Her work can be found in collections including Birmingham Museum of Art, The J. Crew Group, and the Tennessee State Museum. She is a recipient of several awards including from NYFA/Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Sustainable Arts Foundation, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, and Hopper Prize. Originally from Arkansas, Hays holds a BFA from The University of Tennessee and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Art. NOtable Scholarship includes close work wth the late Pope.L, and fostering collaborations with other artists. Residencies include Yaddo, the Cooper Union, Stoveworks, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been published in New American Painting and Hyperallergic, mentioned in the New York Times, and positively reviewed in ArtForum International and Two Coats of Paint. Her work has been seen most recently in a solo exhibition at Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Susan Inglett Gallery (New York) and Devening Projects (Chicago). She is represented regionally by David Lusk Gallery.