Lora Jost
Mixed media artist
January, mixed-media collage
As a professional artist, Lora Jost's creative work includes making and exhibiting fine art, teaching, writing grants, facilitating community arts projects, illustrating, and writing. She has widely exhibited theme-based bodies of work using mixed-media collage, scratchboard, and mosaic, most recently Linked in Spirit, a visual commentary on multi-layered experiences. Past exhibits include Meetings and Other Mysteries (about ways that people group together), Weathering the Storm (based on stories of perseverance), The Experience of Farmers (based on interviews with farmers about their joys and struggles) and Two Mothers Two Sons (about mother-son relationships). I produced The Experience of Farmers with support from artist residencies in New York Mills, Minnesota and Glasco, Kansas. Jost co-authored with Dave Loewenstein the book Kansas Murals: A Traveler’s Guide (University Press of Kansas, 2006) with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kansas Arts Commission, which received a Kansas Notable Book award from the Kansas Center for the Book in Wichita.
Jost has taught art classes at the Lawrence Arts Center for many years, and has facilitated classes in many other settings, including a parks and playgrounds program in Madison, Wisconsin, at a rape crisis center in Lawrence, Kansas, and at a soup kitchen in Bloomington, Indiana. She holds a BA from Bethel College (North Newton, KS, 1988) and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, WI, 1992).