molly jochem is an artist who uses collage, printmaking, sculpture, and other media with a focus on painting. She was raised in the rural foothills of Northern California and has lived in Portland, OR, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Oakland, and Nevada City, CA, where she currently resides. .

She earned a BA in Fine Art from San Francisco State University in 2001 and has maintained a prolific workflow ever since.

She is a champion of community-based art programs. In 2006, she co-founded  Quart: Queer Art Collective in Portland, before becoming the visual arts director at Siren Nation in 2008. She was Executive Director at the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center in Nevada City from 2017 to 2023. She has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions throughout the West Coast, notably The Museum of Northern California Art, Gallery 10, and Blueline Gallery.

molly travels extensively, exploring unfamiliar landscapes to gain perspectives on the terrestrial experience. She recently toured the Irish coast by bicycle,exploring her ancestral roots. This trip resulted in a series of paintings she completed in 2023. Her current body of work is inspired by the extremes of light, climate, and shifting tectonics she experienced on a trip to  Iceland in 2024. 

molly looks to fiction and memoir to inform her worldview, because she finds these more authentic and trustworthy than history books. She questions culture and the direction it's heading through visual art. In 2024, she exhibited the series People Make Me Nervous, which drew from family photographs and combined them with historical fictions, telling the love stories of couples in front of Yosemite’s Half Dome, the early colonization of agricultural land in California by big business, tourist photographs in front of the erupting Mt. Saint Helens volcano, and serene pie-eating contests with well-dressed attendees while mushroom clouds explode in the distance. 

molly gathers sensual data–sights, smells, and sounds–as well as emotion from the landscapes around her. Communing with the mystery of the huge organism we all embody, which is, in turn, linked to the cosmos of our universe,  molly works to capture and synthesize the chaos and magic of everyday experience into her artwork. Colors, textures, and patterns are the visual storytelling tools through which she explores the eternal human questions, defining a worldview she can feel a part of.