About Jen Myhre, creator of More Art Less Fear
Jen Myhre is a community-taught artist working in printmaking, alternative process photography and collage currently based in Northern Arizona after over thirty years in the Bay area. She grew up in both Tucson AZ and Long Island NY. She imprinted on the desert landscapes of Arizona but loves the salty briny scent of her childhood on the Peconic Bay and learned to love trees in the old growth redwood forests of California. An art life was not something she saw anywhere around her growing up, but the toll of work as a career sociology teacher drove her to find ways to express ideas beyond the confines of her academic training. She used to joke that her day job was to “deliver the bad news” about inequalities of race, class and gender and started pursuing training in visual arts to save her own sanity. She learned firsthand how artmaking reduced her fear and despair. As a sociologist, her artistic journey began in documentary filmmaking, photography and digital storytelling and she received a graduate certificate in documentary filmmaking from George Washington University. You can learn more about her work in the documentary arts here. In many ways, the still frame and editing remain the foundation of her artistic practice. In 2021, she left sociology to become a community organizer; in 2024, she left that job to take the leap to full time artist. She was a 2018 Belle Foundation for Cultural Development grantee in the visual arts and in 2025 was chosen for the Politics in Collage residency hosted by the Kolaj Institute. She launched More Art Less Fear in 2025 to both share her own works and offer hands-on workshops pitched towards people who are intimidated by or utterly unfamiliar with creative practices. As a teacher and community organizer she saw the crucial role of art and creativity in civic engagement and democracy. Art-making by people who do not identify as artists is a practice of courage, dreaming and world-building that strengthens collective power.
My vision is a world where everyone makes and experiences more art and less fear.
My mission is to make art and experiences with art-making that provoke wonder:
wonder in the sense of curiosity–raising questions about our relationships to the systems that produce large scale human suffering and our own power and agency to confront and transform these systems
wonder in the sense of awe–delight and discovery both of the living world that surrounds us and of our own capacities, courage and creativity.
Like every creature, I contain multitudes. And so do collage and printmaking. Collage and printmaking allow me to explore how I am both complicit in and actively resisting the human systems that produce large scale suffering. Through layering and juxtaposition, covering and revealing, collage and printmaking allow visualization of how I wrestle with my own denial and accountability in these systems. Mistakes from my work as a printmaker and alternative process photographer get transformed into collage, alongside intentional works I have built using text, printmaking, painting and found materials. I have a print by Julio Salgado, of the Center for Cultural Power, above my computer that reads, “What am I supposed to do with this broken heart? –Asked no artist ever.” When over a decade of teaching people about social suffering finally broke my heart, it was art that mended it. I deliberately work in the visual arts most accessible to people untrained in the arts--printmaking and collage—because part of my art practice is to develop other people’s creative skills. As a teacher I have learned that so many of us need encouragement–literally, to be given courage–to try something new creatively. Through my work in Showing Up for Racial Justice, I helped to facilitate Make Art Make Justice workshops with people with little to no art training. These participants described how powerful it was to create something that didn't exist before. One participant wrote me afterwards to tell me, “I didn’t know I was an artist until you said it was okay.” These workshops helped me see how central the physical act of creation is both to imagining a more just world and to developing the courage needed to bring that world into being. That’s how More Art Less Fear was born.