Mimi
Pinnow
Media:
Painting, Drawing
Studio Location:
12-23 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101
Room/Studio#
2
Website:
Artist Bio:
Mimi Pinnow (b. Greenwood, IN) is a Long Island City, NY based visual artist. She holds an MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA (2020) and has exhibited her work across the U.S., including in New York, Maryland, and the Midwest. Her practice explores the intimate connections between the body, memory, the natural world, and interior domestic spaces through organic materials and forms. Pinnow creates meditative environments that evoke impermanence, nostalgia, and quiet reflection. Her work is included in private collections, including that of Indiana University Bloomington. Most recently, she co-curated a multimedia exhibition titled Doors of Perception at Botanica Grove Gallery in Bushwick and is currently showing work at Here BK in Williamsburg.
Artist Statement:
My painting practice explores meditative moments through windows and openings—architectural and painterly—that frame vantage points, thresholds, and suspended spaces of reflection. I build rough dioramas from cardboard, fabric, and balsa wood as skeletal frameworks for my compositions, preserving memory through imperfect construction. Painting from these "junk maquettes" feels like painting from within a dollhouse of recollection.
Color is my primary language: emotional, spatial, atmospheric, and structural. It organizes composition while setting the tonal pitch of a painting. Light bodies—glows and transient forms—punctuate space, embodying sensations of nostalgia, memory, energy, and loss without directing the viewer.
Nature anchors my practice: the soft collision of light through summer leaves, the afterimage of a Midwestern garden speckled with cosmos. Cyanotype allows me to capture the glow of natural light photographically, threading into the botanical references that occasionally appear in my still-life elements.
Though I began as a perceptual painter, my work increasingly leans into abstraction. Painting remains an evolving inquiry into memory, impermanence, and renewal—a quiet place where decay, growth, and reflection unfold.