Barbara Yontz

Biography

Barbara Yontz is an artist and educator living in Nashville, TN. With master’s degrees in art history and art education and an MFA in Visual Art, Yontz currently teaches art studio, theory and history in the MFA program at Watkins College of Art at Belmont University. In addition, she has been teaching in college programs in men’s and women’s prisons in New York and Tennessee since 2018. Teaching and art practice often became integrated working with undergraduate students at Independent Watkins in Nashville, St. Thomas Aquinas College in New York and now with master’s students.

Studio work is conceptual often using materials and processes as metaphors for the interconnections experienced in our life choices. Currently working on a series of mixed media works based on her personal relationships with incarcerated individuals, she hopes to make visible what is ordinarily invisible by design. Yontz has exhibited works at the Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville; the Frist Museum, Nashville; the Jose Marti National Library, Havana; the Boston Museum School; the Phoenix Gallery, New York; and the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, NJ.

An interest in social justice led to a collaborative art project initiated with two Watkins colleagues that paired men in a Nashville prison with artists and students in Tennessee and New York. This led to many art exhibitions, public talks and an article in Higher Education and the Carceral State, edited by Annie Buckley and published by Rutledge Press.  

Personal Website:
www.barbarayontz.net