Jonathan earned his B.F.A. in Studio Art and minor in Art History (summa cum laude) at Washington State University where he was named Outstanding Senior, Top Ten Senior, and Executive Member of the Year for 2016. Prior to completing a terminal M.F.A. degree in Studio Art and being named a finalist for the Alumni Award for Excellence at the University of Idaho in 2019, Matteson was recognized for his interdisciplinary research, gallery leadership, and effective educational efforts with Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Service Awards.
In 2014, Jonathan won the Gold Grant Scholarship & John Ringen Award, which is a multi-state competition in the U.S. juried by the Northwest Watercolor Society. In addition to donating his artworks to hospitals and hosting art therapy themed events, Matteson dedicated a 24-page jewel case CD he designed in 2017 for Dr. Jovanni-Rey V. de Pedro’s Tributo a Ginastera to Argentina’s “Los Desaparecidos” who disappeared during The Dirty War (1976-1983). Beyond studying visual music movements like Synchromism, Jonathan is a fashionable foodie who likes to play bass, golf, and video games.
Matteson is also the former Education Curator for the Mulvane Art Museum in Topeka, Kansas that is celebrating its upcoming centennial with a “Yes, MAM!” campaign slogan that he coined. “Mr. Jonathan” managed the museum’s makerspace, ArtLab, led numerous docent tours, created playlists, and participated in events that supported students of all backgrounds. Moreover, Matteson ensured that MAM became the first art museum in Kansas to provide EnChroma indoor and outdoor branded eyewear to their color-challenged patrons. Currently, Matteson is a private tutor, guest lecturer, and artist-in-residence working on adding to eclectic oeuvre after a decade of professionally making and appreciating art.
Verbal or not, art is onomatopoeic. And my work as a teaching artist perpetuates interdisciplinary (e.g. visual music) approaches to making and appreciating art that challenges design through structural and symbolic uses of illumination/color, texture, dot/point, line, shape, form, and time based on historical precedent from aesthetics, psychophysics, comparative politics, and world religions.
“Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.” – G.W.F. Hegel
“To study one artistic medium in isolation from others is to study an inadequacy…partly because the artists themselves insisted again and again upon the inextricability of the arts.” – Daniel Albright
“Fine art, by its very name, implies fine relations.” – Arthur Wesley Dow
"I do not want art for a few, anymore than I want education for a few, or freedom for a few..." – William Morris
“A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection―not an invitation for hypnosis.” – Umberto Eco
"It is, though, an ironic truth that the moment when art claims to be 'above' contemporary life is always the moment it becomes controlled by it." – Alastair Mackintosh
"This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well." – Paulo Freire