Joy Garnett

Joy Amina Garnett (born 1960) is an artist and writer from New York, United States. Trained as a painter, her artwork explores contemporary practices around cultural preservation, alternative histories and archives. Her interdisciplinary work combines creative writing, research and visual media. In her early paintings (1997–2009), Garnett engaged issues around contemporary consumption of media and the distinctions between documentary, technical, and artistic image making. Her mature work draws on archival images, alternative histories and the legacy of her maternal grandfather, the Egyptian Romantic poet, bee scientist and polymath Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi. Garnett is married to conceptual photographer and video artist Bill Jones.

Garnett was awarded a writing fellowship at Yaddo in Spring 2024 to work on her family memoir The Bee Kingdom, which was Longlisted for the First Pages Prize in Creative Nonfiction later that year. She was a 2019-20 Shift Artist in Residence at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. In 2011, she received a joint commission from the Chipstone Foundation and the Milwaukee Art Museum to produce work for the traveling exhibition “The Tool At Hand” (2011–2013). In 2007, she was an artist in residence at iCommons, Dubrovnik, Croatia, and in 2005, she was an artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

In 2004, Garnett received an Anonymous Was A Woman Award. She has also received grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC).

In 2019, Garnett became the Art Director of the literary magazine Evergreen Review, founded in 1957 by Barney Rosset and re-launched in 2017 by John Oakes. From 2005 to 2016, she was the Arts Editor at Cultural Politics, a scholarly journal published by Duke University Press that features in each issue an essay written by a visual artist about their work. From 2013 to 2016, she penned "Copy That!", a column on fair use issues in visual art, for Art21 Magazine. She was the founder of NEWSgrist, an electronic newsletter and art blog (ca. 2000–2017). From 1999 til 2001, she wrote the column "Into Africa" for artnet magazine.

Controversy surrounding Garnett's 2003 painting "Molotov" drew international scrutiny to issues of authorship, appropriation and fair use in visual art. She lectured and wrote widely on these topics.