Jessica Stockholder USA, b. 1959

Jessica Stockholder is an internationally acclaimed visual artist whose practice defines the vanguard of the Expanded Field of Painting. She is an inductee to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Anonymous Was A Woman, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others.

Stockholder formulates three-dimensional pictures in space, which interact in unpredictable ways with the environments they occupy and explore how perception relates to feelings of chaos and control. The work employs the visual strategies of painting, sculpture, and installation—though it also resists the limitations such terms imply. Stockholder mobilizes consumer products and industrial materials as a way to confront the threat they pose to human existence, and to critique the superficial relationship people have with technology and consumption. By incorporating such concepts and objects into her practice, Stockholder imbues the work with myriad levels of meaning and political resonance.

Stockholder’s work has been exhibited in many of the world’s most influential art venues, including Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Dia Center for the Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Venice Biennale. It is included in such internationally renowned museum collections as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, USA; Centre Pompidou (Musée National d'Art Moderne), Paris, France; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; the British Museum, London, UK; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA, USA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA; Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands; GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany; mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; National Gallery of Australia, Parkes, Australia; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada, among many others. Her public artworks have been commissioned by museums, municipalities, and corporations around the world.

In addition to earning her BFA from the University of Victoria in Canada and her MFA from Yale University, she has been awarded two honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees: one from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2010, and one from Columbia College in 2013. Stockholder is currently the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, a position she accepted in 2011, after 12 years as Director of the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art.