Joanne Tepper Saffren

Joanne Tepper Saffren
Artist, Designer, Curator

Joanne Tepper Saffren is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the layered terrain of memory, home, and resilience. Originally from Los Angeles and now based in Sacramento, her practice is deeply informed by personal loss, the cycles of nature, and transformative processes of making. She works across a rich palette of materials and processes—cyanotype, anthrotype, painting, sculpture, ceramics, furniture making, and paper making—creating works that serve as vessels for remembrance and reflection.

A graduate of Otis College of Art and Design (BFA, 1978) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 2018), Joanne spent nearly four decades as a graphic designer, art director, and art educator, earning more than 50 awards for her work with clients ranging from banks and universities to national campaigns for Mattel’s Barbie. This foundation in design informs her meticulous approach to materiality and visual storytelling.

Her projects include sculptural chairs built in 2018 from drought-killed trees that washed ashore at Folsom Lake. She is drawn to the chair as furniture’s most generous form—one that holds and supports us. She sees these trees as profound teachers and these works extend their lives, honoring their gifts in an era of ecological fragility. Her life-sized paper pulp paintings, created from the clothes left in the closet after her husband’s sudden death, transform grief into tangible beauty.

Her 2025 exhibition, Trees, at Axis Gallery, features cyanotype and anthrotype portraits of Folsom’s ancient oaks—works that celebrate these majestic beings while quietly acknowledging our precarious relationship with the natural world. Proceeds support the Sacramento Tree Foundation.

As a curator, Joanne has organized exhibitions such as View from the Hill and Thresholds, inviting artists to consider the evolving meanings of temporality, home, labor, and belonging. Her curatorial vision is influenced by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, emphasizing the layered, fragmentary, and poetic qualities of domestic life.

A member of Axis Gallery, Mother Art: Revisited, and Domestic Collective, Joanne is committed to fostering community and dialogue through art. Her work—whether personal or collaborative—honors the fragile beauty of relationship: weaving connections among humans, animals, plants, and objects, each with its own presence, memory, and meaning.

Artist web site: joanneteppersaffren.com