Bio
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.
Artist Statement
Showing the worst of humanity in the best light.
An indomitable sense of humor and optimism shine through in my paintings, which often depict the inequalities, injustices, and disasters of the contemporary and historical worlds.
I dig through the closet of society and look for the hidden, leopard-spotted underwear that the politician wears on his nights out. I broadcast my find, spotlighting the fact that we are only human and all of us contain foibles.
I gather sensual data–sights, smells, and sounds–as well as emotion, from the landscape and the huge organism that is unconsciously & psychically linked together forming this universe. I work to capture and synthesize the chaos and magic of this data into artwork.
I use color, texture, and pattern as visual storytelling tools that explore eternal human questions and define a worldview I can feel a part of.
Through the use of handmade patterning, I create a visual reminder that everything on earth is a carbon-based life form, highlighting the similarities between peoples, animals and lands. I also continuously celebrate the diversity of the human experience, creating a counterpoint to homogenization that results in the completely obvious, but often overlooked, fact of equality. I include earth, animal, and plant life in my non- hierarchal vision.
My paintings tell stories, using photographic, printmaking and theatrical qualities that nod to the fictions we live out every day. They share a tongue in cheek irreverence with irony, but have a softer edge--more gold than iron, like “goldenry.” They poke at the absurdity of life, in a beautiful way.
My forested home and many world travels, especially to places of truly awesome natural wonders, have become an integral part of my creative process. I treasure and prioritize spending time outside of everyday society in the company of earth, stone, rivers, and trees. This communing with the raw elements of life has helped me build a foundation of calm rationality within myself, which I then bring to life on canvas. Although the facts of our animal bodies interacting with the shared natural world is straightforward in many ways, I want to call forward the absurdities, contradictions, joy, and ever-shifting quality of our experience. Things are not always what they seem. I invite viewers into an open-ended, but recognizable story, asking them to participate in re-imagining the world.
CV
Solo Shows
2025 South Pine Cafe, Grass Valley, Ca.
2025 The Icelands, North Columbia Cultural Center, Nevada City, Ca
2024 People Make Me Nervous, Kitkitdizzi, Nevada City, Ca.
2023 North Columbia Cultural Center, Nevada City, Ca
2023 Ridge Stop Café, North San Juan, Ca.
2022 Kitkitdizzi Nevada City, Ca.
2021 Listen to the Diggins, North Columbia Cultural Center, Nevada City, Ca
2019 North San Juan Community Center, North San Juan, Ca.
2018 Ridge Café, Nevada City, Ca.
2016 North Columbia Cultural Center, Nevada City, Ca
2014 Polly’s Paladar, Nevada City, Ca.
2012 Willow Springs, North San Juan, Ca.
2011 Cup & Saucer, Portland, Or.
2011 Ritual Art Tattoo, Portland, Or.
Group Shows
2025 H20, Museum of Northern California Art, Chico, CA
2025 Pint Size 3, Transmission Gallery, Oakland, CA
2025 Eleven Visions, Seven Stars Gallery, Nevada City, CA
2025 Wanderlust, Blue Line Arts Gallery, Roseville, CA
2025 Golden State Exhibit, Gallery 10, Sutter Creek, CA.
2024 Membership Medley, Blueline Gallery, Roseville, CA
2024 Golden State Exhibit, Gallery 10, Sutter Creek, CA
2023 Storytelling Show, North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center, Nevada City, CA
2019 Reflections, Museum of Northern California, Chico, CA
2023 As If Small Works Show, Grass Valley, CA
2018 With Gigi, NCSCC, Nevada City, CA
2017 Erin Noel, Amber Cone & molly jochem, NCSCC, Nevada City, CA
2014 Pure Gold: Just Like My Hands, North Columbia Cultural Center, North Columbia, CA
2014 Kitkidizzi, Nevada City, CA
2011 Portland Love Show 2011, Gallery Homeland, Portland, OR
2010 Henson/Jochem , Nevada City, CA
2009 Sequestrium, Tree Top Gallery, Portland, OR
2009 Arabella, Holocene , Portland, OR
2008 Transcendence, Launch Pad Gallery, Portland, OR
2008 Alphabet Soup, Woolley at Wonder Gallery, Portland, OR
2008 Third Annual Love Show, Launch Pad Gallery, Portland, OR
2007 Panel show, Portland Art Center, Portland, OR
2007 Barbie Meltdown Theatre, Launch Pad Gallery, Portland, OR
2007 Celebrating Queer Community II, City Hall, Portland, OR
2007 Flight, Haven Coffee House, Portland, OR
2007 Blue Landscape, Sound Grounds, Portland, OR
2006 Quart Birthday , Q Center, Portland, OR
2006 Yellow, Tin Shed Cafe, Portland, OR
2006 Celebrating Queer Community, City Hall, Portland, OR
2006 Radical Women III, Nevada City, CA
2006 Miniatures, Cup and Saucer Cafe, Portland , OR
Grants, Awards and Affiliations
2025 Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) Quick Grant
2024 Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) Quick Grant
2006 Talisman Co-operative Gallery
2005-2006 Quart Art Collective
2008 Siren Nation Women’s Art and Music Festival
2005 North Colombia Community Art Show Award
Education
Artist in Residence, KALA Art Institute, Berkley, CA 2025
BA Fine Arts , San Francisco State University. 2002
Summer program, California College of Arts and Crafts
Artistic Travel
2025 Quincy Plein Air Festival, Quincy CA
2024 Iceland Road trip with corresponding paintings
2023 Ireland Bicycle tour with corresponding paintings
2023 New Zealand train & car trip with corresponding paintings
2015|2018|2019|2020 Hawaii with Plein Air and corresponding paintings
2016 Southern Utah with Plein Air paintings