Bio

Joey Schmidt is an artist and arts administrator based in Kansas City, MO with a pending move to Atlanta, GA in Summer 2026. His practice circles themes of time, memory, and the fragile negotiations between what we hide and reveal. Schmidt uses painting, printmaking, and photography to transform fleeting moments into lasting expressions of identity and connection. His work balances tenderness with humor and theatricality, inviting others to see themselves reflected in the objects we keep through color, form, and dialogue. He hopes to be cool, persevering, and prudent. Hopes!

Passionate about accessibility in the arts, Schmidt extends this ethos into community engagement, using his leadership to foster belonging, dialogue, and shared discovery. Through his studio brand Studio Buddy, he cultivates a space for painting, collaboration, and community sessions rooted in creativity and connection. Schmidt is a 2016 graduate of the University of Louisville's Hite Art Institute, a 2011 alumnus of Kentucky's Governor's School for the Arts, and a 2025 Artist INC Fellow with Charlotte Street Foundation and Mid-America Arts Alliance. He also serves as Director of Corporate & Grant Partnerships at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Find him on Instagram at @joeyyyschmidt and @studiooobuddy.

Artist Statement

My work begins in the small moments that linger and grows into paintings, prints, and photographs that hold memory and emotion in wordless colors and objects.

I work with the tools of my creative lineage - layering symbols, shapes, and objects into scenes that trace connections across lifetimes. What I'm after is not the event but what it leaves behind: the feeling that outlasts the facts, the image that arrives already changed by the distance it traveled to reach you. Film photography anchors this. The frame fixes a moment and distorts it at the same time, and I've learned to trust that distortion. It's closer to how things are actually remembered than any faithful record could be.

I treat color as both prayer and dialogue, introducing tones to each other until they find kinship, rampant tension, or something that doesn't resolve cleanly. I'm less interested in the answer than in what the work knows before I do.

I am investing in this practice more seriously now, seeking the time, space, and community to make work that is unfiltered, grounded, and released of self-inflicted judgment. I have spent a long time learning what it means to belong fully to my own life. This is what that looks like. I want to show you.