JESSICA RANKIN

Early life and education of Jessica Rankin

Jessica Rankin was born in 1971 in Sydney, Australia, and she now lives and works in New York. Her parents are painter David Rankin and poet/playwright Jennifer Rankin; after Jennifer Rankin’s death in 1979, David Rankin later married writer Lily Brett.

Rankin completed a Bachelor of Arts in history at the University of Melbourne in 1993 before relocating to New York in the early 1990s.) She subsequently studied at the New York Studio School and received an MFA in painting from Rutgers University in 1997.

For many years, Rankin shared a New York studio with her previous partner artist Julie Mehretu, sustaining a long-term conversation between their practices. She has described how camping near Uluru and other experiences of the Australian landscape shaped her sense of scale and the spatial dynamics of her work.

Jessica Rankin artworks and style

For much of her early career, Jessica Rankin created delicate textile works on translucent organdy, often suspended in space so that the embroideries cast shifting shadows. These embroidered organdy ‘mental maps’ weave cartographic lines, constellations, codes, and streams of text that reference memory, intuition, and scientific and geographical data.

Key textile works include Nocturne (2004), Everything is Still There (2005), Hour to Hour (2007), and Passage (Dusty Humming) (2007), which layer words and symbols in floating, map-like configurations. These pieces suggest multiple viewpoints at once—looking up at stars, down at city lights, or across terrain—while combining personal, fictional, and historical voices.

In 2016 Rankin turned decisively toward painting, bringing gestural abstraction and stitched mark-making together on linen and canvas. She has cited John Cage‘s idea of embracing the unfamiliar as a touchstone, deliberately using difficult gestures and unstable processes to push herself beyond the comfort of embroidery.

Recent series such as Sky Sound at White Cube Hong Kong feature large-scale acrylic and embroidered linen works with meteor-like strokes, luminous circles, and fringe-like threads that echo drips of paint. These canvases—including works like Fall out of the Sun, JR (2024)—evoke eclipses and celestial bodies while challenging hierarchies that historically separate ‘high’ painting from feminised textile labour.

Rankin’s watercolours and works on paper extend these motifs on a more intimate scale, combining stains, coiling lines, and written fragments to suggest lunar cycles and psychological landscapes.

Jessica Rankin Exhibitions

Since the early 2000s, Rankin has exhibited widely across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia, presenting new paintings and embroidered works to international audiences. Solo exhibitions at institutions such as MoMA PS1, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, and White Cube reflect significant institutional and commercial recognition.

She has held regular solo exhibitions with White Cube, including Sky Sound at White Cube Hong Kong in 2024, as well as a solo exhibition in London in 2026. Earlier solo shows include presentations at Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta (2013), and Salon 94, New York (2014). In 2016, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium, presented Dear Another, a major solo exhibition of Rankin’s practice. In 2025, Rankin presented work in her Australia at Cassandra Bird in Sydney.

Rankin’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York was held at MoMA PS1 in 2006, following earlier solo presentations at Franklin Artworks, Minneapolis (2005), and The Project, New York (2009).

She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions including White Cube, London; MoMA PS1, New York; Franklin Artworks, Minneapolis; Palazzo Grassi, Venice; and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

Further reading on Jessica Rankin

In an interview for Ocula in 2024, ’Jessica Rankin on Embracing the Unfamiliar’, the artist discusses her practice in depth.

Jessica Rankin FAQs

Ocula | 2024