All the hanging space on the walls of Joan Sonnenberg’s North Naples home has long been filled with the 94-year-old artist’s etchings, oils, acrylics and family photos. A sea of additional canvases crowd the floors, stacked and propped against the baseboards. There’s little room in the garage for cars; it’s filled with her largest canvases. Paintings bisect her bedroom’s walkable space. Her backroom studio holds works in progress, piles of paints and bins of pastels. The living room, hallways and kitchen allow just enough space for her little dog, Genevieve Bell, to skitter about. Sonnenberg’s daughter, Sue, suggests that the home isn’t really a house at all. “More of a gallery, or, really, a museum,” I suggest. “A museum—oh, I like that,” Sonnenberg retorts with a gleaming smile.
From among the myriad works, Sonnenberg retrieves a series of momentos: a half dozen copies of the Carnegie Mellon University student newspapers with covers she illustrated in the 1950s; clippings from newspapers and magazines; documents of the 60-plus awards collected over the decades; and a booklet from her recent exhibit at Arts Bonita, Two Sides to Everything: The Art of Joan Sonnenberg.
“Two sides to everything,” she says again and again. The mantra has become emblematic of the artist’s life and career. Her body of work, an amassment of thousands of canvases, represents realist and abstract inclinations. Her parents—a staunch Presbyterian, republican engineer who worked on The Manhattan Project and an artistic, democratic Catholic who worked as a professional singer at the local Jewish temple—shaped her worldview with love, respect and understanding despite anyone’s differences. “I laugh about them because they were complete opposites,” Sonnenberg says. “They taught me the value of appreciating other people’s ideas.”
In her backroom studio, where the artist churns out one giant canvas after another, she flips through a stack of images snapped on the four miles she walks daily, shots of plant life and people, cars and cardboard—anything or anyone with an interesting form or sense of color. “I want to live to be 110 and keep painting,” Joan says. She moves through new works a little slower these days (one a month versus her previous one a week) but remains artistically agile, producing abstract and representational canvases, nearly matching her 4-foot-10 frame.
Her discipline reinforces decades of education and practiced mastery in various styles, ranging from abstract purist works like Ascension, with its warm tangerine background and globular forms given dimension by finely sketched, monochromatic lines; to figurative realism, depicting people; to compositions that blend the genres, like Banana Leaves, a congregation of swaying fronds depicted true-to-form with notched leaves and glossy stems, but subverted by contrasting warm and cool tones denoting shaded and sun-illuminated folds. Though persistent in its variations, Joan’s work tends toward a palette of intensity—richly hued compositions with a form and dynamism anchored by her fearless use of black. Each piece seems to capture the energy of the just-set or setting sun. “I like many diversions in art,” Sonnenberg says. “I like people. I like abstractions. I like color.”
Sonnenberg made a name for herself during one of her first professional exhibits at the Butler Museum of Modern Art in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1976, when she was awarded Best of Show for American Dream, a billboard-sized triptych featuring geometric abstract and realistic shapes in reds, whites and blues. She was the first female abstract artist to be bestowed the honor. “I feel a bit proud of that,” she says demurely. “Women came up the hard way, sometimes.”
Sonnenberg imbues her compositions with movement, a sense of forward momentum. She primarily works with acrylics today, but in the ’80s, before the process’ toxic fumes became too much to bear, she would pour nitric acid over metal plates to form the basis for her abstract-meets-figurative etchings (a process similar to screen printing). Works like Dance Fantastique exemplify the artist’s layered style with boldly colored geometric forms and loose, dancing figures, whose clean lines weave in and out of each other in a cubist-like flurry of activity.
Among the most lauded artists in Southwest Florida—alongside close friend and ardent supporter Marcus Jansen—Sonnenberg could fill a museum once, if not two or three times over. Her work has been shown in private homes, corporate offices, and solo and group exhibitions across the U.S.—a portfolio formed as Sonnenberg built dual careers in fine art and as a realtor with Coldwell Banker (then known as Howard Hanna).
Sonnenberg’s artistic studies began at a young age. When she was 10 years old, living near Pittsburgh, the aspiring artist received a scholarship to study at the now Carnegie Museum of Art. When her family moved out of the county, the program made an exception and allowed her to travel in for her weekly studies. “I would take the train on Saturday mornings about 45 miles away into Pittsburgh and get off at East Liberty Station, and then take a trolley to the museum,” she says. “I felt very important at the age of 10 to be able to do this.”
Later, as a student at Carnegie Mellon University, she would walk the streets of Pittsburgh, ducking into auto salvage yards to observe the colors and forms of the warped metal—elements she’d incorporate into her layered abstracts and etchings. Photos of passersby would serve as the basis for her representational work. “They call me the ‘street walking artist,’” she says, pleased.
The painter still takes at least three to four daily walks, guided by her 11-pound shorkie and a rolling walker for stability. Sonnenberg draws inspiration from local banana leaves and palm fronds as much as the heady, Rust Belt influences of her youth.
When it comes to realism and portraiture, Joan favors subjects with beards, hats, costume jewelry and headdresses. “It makes it interesting,” she says. In Served with Pride, Sonnenberg depicts an elderly World War II veteran she met on one such walk whose coy, curled lip smile and rainbow suspenders provide a joyful juxtaposition to his eagle-adorned cap. There’s a duality to the rendering that feels hopeful and poignant in its simplicity—it’s one of her favorites, depicting once more, “Two sides to everything.”

Joan Sonnenberg’s Ascension (1980)
Joan Sonnenberg’s Ascension (1980)
Sonnenberg’s subtropical surroundings make frequent appearances on her canvases—like banana leaves. Ascension (1980) channels the energy of tumbling stones with its’ striations. “They roll together and form a union of interconnecting designs and patterns,” she says.