Associate Professor of Painting Jonah Criswell Receives Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
08.29.2025
After being awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, Jonah Criswell (’05 Painting) reflects on his studio habits, teaching philosophy, and evolving practice rooted in discovery over certainty.
Cottage cheese containers and pickle jars mingle with bottles and tubes in the haphazard library of paint spread across Jonah Criswell’s work tables.
Standing in his West Bottoms studio, he explains that repurposing old packaging is just a reflection that he’s uptight about color. “I don’t like wasting anything,” he says, grabbing an empty yogurt tub and taking off the lid. “These are good for saving paint.”
The palettes themselves eventually cross a line for Criswell. Scattered around the room, the small metal trays sometimes sit stacked, their blobs and splotches preserving the history of larger pieces and longer processes. Criswell always preserves the ones he likes too much.
That sentimentality stands in contrast to the “kill your darlings” approach that often guides his artistic practice. Part of his method, which he calls “The Funnel,” is a potentially never-ending sieve drawing discoveries from past sketchbooks, photos, and other fragments.
“It’s like this: if you make twenty drawings, maybe three of them should be another thing. So then you take those three, keep going, and when you get ten of those then you make them into paintings,” he says.
“And of those 10 paintings, two of them may be good.”
Jonah Criswell is an Associate Professor of Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. He is also an alumni, graduating from the department in 2005. Recently he learned of another title: Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee. It’s a designation coming with up to $50,000 in unrestricted funds to support his work in the visual arts.
For four decades, Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants have enabled visual artists to create new work, purchase needed materials, cover studio rent, and more. Past recipients have shared that this support is critical in allowing concentrated time for studio work, preparation for exhibitions, and other professional opportunities, according to the foundation.
In a way, Criswell applied a version of “The Funnel” to the grant process, meeting every other Friday with his colleague, Professor of Painting Julie Farstad. Together, they strategized and worked on grant applications. In February, Criswell was asked by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation to revise his budget, and he learned just weeks before the start of the school year that he had been awarded the grant.
“The day after I got the grant in my bank account, I ordered a couple thousand dollars in paint. And that was scary,” he said, returning the yogurt container to his table.
Studio Endurance
Criswell grew up in Macon, Georgia and Pensacola, Florida before moving to Kansas City to go to KCAI. With 15 credit hours and a part time job, he was always moving as a student.
“I had a friend of mine who lived down the street from me and she saw me walking to school at like 7:15 am. Then she saw me walking back home at 1 o'clock in the morning. That was all I did for four years,” he says.
“And it was perfect.”
He earned his graduate degree from Penn State in 2008 before returning to the Kansas City Art Institute, first in admissions and later as a faculty member. He teaches classes like figure drawing, organizing field trips to places like the Kansas City Ballet to sketch dancers.
He also teaches Major Studio for fourth-year painting students. Criswell describes the Painting Department at KCAI as deliberately interdisciplinary and that faculty want students to be able to see a lot of different ways to be an artist.
“I just assume that the students are already right and that they've already got something. So how do we make them more right?” Criswell says. “Right?”
He’s also a highly technical thinker, with a strong focus on “color into color,” meaning prioritizing color relationships over tonal ones. For example, he explains that in a painting dominated with orange and red, the middle tones and especially the white can appear to shift toward green and violet. This makes the painting feel alive when viewed in person.
With students, however, he also allows himself to step back.
“There are schools out there that are very much like ‘Teach the way you make things’ but I would hate that. What I get thrilled by is when a student is either repackaging really old ideas in a new vernacular or they're coming at sacred cows from a different angle,” he says.
“That’s a job that will keep you young, right?”
“I just assume that the students are already right and that they've already got something. So how do we make them more right?”
He often uses gym metaphors to describe his practice, such as “The Treadmill.” His goal is to spend 20 hours a week in his studio. That’s four hours a day, five days a week. The treadmill, he explains, represents “Staying in one spot while the ground moves beneath you.”
“I'll come in and pick the painting that is the least resolved because my skill level doesn't need to be super sharp for that. I will work on that for a little bit and then I'll work on something a little bit further along when my technical capacity is a little bit more dialed in. So think of it like stretching and then athletic performance,” he says.
“Then I take photographs,” he says, pointing to his iPad. “And I go home and obsess about it.”
With this mindset, he’s also the kind of professor who will ask the often-dreaded question about a five-year plan. Yet those conversations ease the pressure, opening space to reflect on potential residencies, grants, and lessons from Professional Practice classes.
“Usually in the spring, once they've delivered their work to the BFA show, I pivot to like, let's build a year, you know?” he says. “And that's stuff that I really enjoy.”
Making Unknowns
A big chunk of Criswell’s Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant will be going to supplies and equipment, but it will also fund travel. His plans include Chicago, Vancouver, and Toronto, culminating in a residency in Berlin in the summer of 2026.
He stands before a large work-in-progress, a “love note to studios,” capturing the very vantage point where he stands at the Union Office Studio building. For him, it’s proof that anyone can draw when using the method popularized by Antonio López García: measuring distance and angles by holding a ruler’s end against his cheekbone.
He tilts his head. “I’m farsighted in this eye and near-sighted in the other. When I’m driving, I look out this eye and if I’m reading, I’m looking out that eye,” he says. “I consciously have to make the switch.”
On the treadmill and through the funnel, Criswell says discovery has become his most important priority. As an undergraduate, he painted in a photorealistic style, but now he resists making something with an outcome he already knows. Meaning, when he starts a piece, he doesn’t know what it will look like in the end.
“I spend so much time in the studio that, after a few years, I’ll come across paintings I love but have forgotten I even named,” he says. “Or I’ll pull a book I want to read out of storage, open it, and find passages I’d already underlined.”
He turns back to his easel, preparing to frame a rectangular space in orange. He calls the process routine and unexciting, but surprises himself when the shade hits the canvas.