About
Jeremy Novy
Paints koi for a living. Each one means something.
Credentials
Recognized work
- NEA Grantee2008 + 2011
- SF Arts CommissionGrant recipient
- Yale UniversityCurated A History of Queer Street Art · 2013
- Museum holdingsGLBT Historical Society · YBCA · Museum of Sex NYC
- Public commissionFulton Plaza, SF, 2× 65-70ft koi · 2024
Bio
Twenty years. Eight thousand koi.
Jeremy Novy is an American stencil street artist best known for koi fish iconography painted across San Francisco and worldwide since 2006. With over 8,000 koi documented globally, his work encodes meaning through Chinese numerological symbolism, a coded visual language he studied during a 2006 residency in Beijing.
A pioneer of contemporary queer street art, Novy curated A History of Queer Street Art, the world's first group exhibition of queer street artists, which traveled from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Yale University in 2013.
Novy was born in 1979 in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, and emancipated at sixteen. He worked at the Boot Camp Saloon, a queer leather bar in Milwaukee, while attending the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee's Peck School of the Arts, where he received a BFA in Photography in 2008. He is a two-time NEA grantee (2008, 2011) and currently lives in Cathedral City, California.
Resume
Selected exhibitions & awards
- 2024Fulton Plaza Pioneer Monument Koi (SF Civic Center) · Illuminate-funded public commission
- 2020Voss Gallery solo: The First Pride Was a Riot
- 2020Let's Paint the Town (LA), co-organized with Art Share LA, 50+ murals
- 2018Black Cat Alley Milwaukee, first artist commissioned
- 2013Yale University, A History of Queer Street Art curated group show
- 2013I Am Divine documentary credit (Jeffrey Schwarz)
- 2011National Endowment for the Arts grant
- 2008National Endowment for the Arts grant; BFA Photography UWM Peck School of the Arts
- 2006Beijing residency; began koi practice