Jan Dickey received an MFA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2017 and a BFA from the University of Delaware in 2009. He has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally in Tokyo, Japan. Jan was a resident artist at ARTnSHELTER (Tokyo, Japan) in 2019, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center (Nebraska City, NE) in 2018, and the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) in 2017. In 2020 he curated exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art (Why Are You Painting?) and Studio9D in Chelsea, NY (Another Year in the Republic). In 2021 Jan was included in the Chengdu Biennale (Chengdu, China) special exhibition “Interdependency: Meeting the Universe Halfway” curated by Shulang Zou & He Xi. His work was also recently featured in the International Painting Annual 9 published by Manifest Press (Cincinnati, OH), as well as the I Like Your Work podcast fall 2022 catalog for the “Finding a Memory” exhibition curated by Erika B Hess (Boston, MA). His studio is located in Brooklyn, NY.

Jan's medium is paint, which he prepares from dry pigments and historically researched earth-based binders like rabbit skin glue, casein, egg, wax and oil. He also incorporates homemade natural dyes. Jan is interested in exploring paint as a living substance - using peeling, cracking and the unearthing of forms through sanding to produce texturally complex surfaces. Jan is presently engaged with the 5-pointed star as a subject, repeating it over and over at different sizes and at shifting angles. Within the context of the paintings he uses the star as a bounded geometric form, which both contains and excludes compositional space. Within the context of the culture, Jan is interested in the star as a powerful symbol with a slippery, shifting meaning from person to person and across time and place.