John J. O'Connor is an American artist whose large-scale, labor-intensive abstract works on paper transform information through idiosyncratic processes, creating equally idiosyncratic abstract shapes, forms, and patterns. His practice bridges text and language with abstraction, drawing on relationships between spoken and written language, psychological fallacies, self-experimentation, mathematics, emergence in science and anthropology, climate prediction, and error. O'Connor's work maps transformations from one known state to another—whether sudden and dramatic, like a political revolution or earthquake, or subtle and incremental, like the shift from rain to ice or believer to agnostic. He explores these phase transitions across natural, mathematical, social, psychological, and political dimensions, seeking to visually capture the specific, often invisible moments of transformation from the mundane to the monumental. His central works are meticulous, large-scale drawings made with colored pencil and graphite on paper. These pieces integrate information and language with shapes, forms, logos, pop imagery, and patterns, linking the process of looking with that of reading, decoding, and interpreting. O'Connor's process reveals unlikely connections between seemingly disparate data—conversations with Cleverbot, chess game patterns, sunspot fluctuations, temperature prediction errors, Nostradamus prophecies, census reports, memory fallacies, conspiracy theories, Hollywood narratives, and more—often yielding humorous or absurdist results. He also works in sculpture, photography, collage, and digital art, and is a member of the experimental art and technology collective NonCoreProjector. Born in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1972, O'Connor received an MFA in Painting and an MS in Art History and Criticism from Pratt Institute in 2000. He was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts and has attended residencies at MacDowell, Skowhegan, the Vermont Studio Center, the Celia & Wally Gilbert Artist-in-Residence Program, and the Cold Spring Harbor Science Center. He has received two New York Foundation for the Arts grants (in painting and drawing), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio residency. O'Connor has exhibited extensively both internationally and domestically, with shows at venues including Andrea Rosen Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, White Columns, Ronald Feldman Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Baltimore, the Wellin Museum, the Queens Museum, the Tang Museum, the Arkansas Arts Center, and the Weatherspoon Museum, as well as abroad at The Lab (Ireland), Martin Asbaek Gallery (Denmark), Rodolphe Janssen Gallery (Brussels), Neue Berliner Raume (Germany), Louhu District Art Museum (Shenzhen), and TW Fine Art (Australia). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Bomb Magazine, The Village Voice, Art Papers, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America. He has presented his work in discussion with Fred Tomaselli at The New Museum, and a catalogue spanning ten years of his practice was published with essays by Robert Storr, John Yau, and Rick Moody. O'Connor's work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Weatherspoon Museum, Hood Museum, and Southern Methodist University, among others. He teaches and co-chairs the Visual Arts program at Sarah Lawrence College.