’80ft of Tomatoes’ – Tinca Joyner

A neighbor of the towering grain elevator, 10-year old Tinca Joyner found inspiration for her submission from the plants she cultivates in her own backyard.  Both a productive farmer and artist, Tinca has lived in Omaha for all of her 10-year life and has been making art and planting seeds for most of it.  The Stored Potential jury found the intersection of these two things especially noteworthy in Joyner’s use of reds and oranges to depict the juicy fruit (or is it a vegetable?) in a style representative of Art Nouveau, especially in its tenet of applying artistic design to everyday utilitarian objects, in order to make beautiful things available to everyone. Although Tinca intended for the tomatoes in her drawing to be oriented to the bottom, as a tomato plant often looks like when supporting large bunches of fruit from a plant that commonly out-produces the needs of the grower, Tinca says the guy at Kinkos accidentally scanned her drawing with the tomatoes to the top.  Perhaps he knew that placing the bunch of tomatoes at the top of the elevator would maximize their exposure.

At Tinca’s house, her family has a garden set up in the front yard. She loves to choose seeds at the hardware store and watch them grow for harvest. Along with beets, carrots and peas, Tinca has decided to take on the task of growing a watermelon this year along with some poppies and sunflowers. She enjoys painting as well as drawing and always keeps an easel set up at the foot of her bed. She likes to host mini art shows in the stairwell of her house when her family is entertaining. While typically, Tinca likes to work in abstraction, she chose to draw cherry tomatoes for the grain elevator because they are the most fun of all vegetables to draw and eat.

When entrant identities were revealed at the end of the jury day, we discovered that Tinca is daughter of Omaha singer-songwriter Simon Joyner, considered by some as the forefather of the Omaha music scene.  Perhaps Tinca will be the forebearer of a burgeoning oversized art-about-agriculture scene?