Jessica Stockholder Biography

Stockholder’s arrangements defy categorisation and are underpinned by a logic that probes its viewers to consider the very ‘sculptural-ness’ and  ‘visual-ness’ of the encounter. As a highly acclaimed thinker, her formal decisions balance attention to the nature of perception and our experiences of chaos and control, inspiring questions in relation to our frames of understanding. Through probing the very tangibility of what’s conceived and experienced, Stockholder’s work deals with our fundamental interaction with art, form, space and location.

Stockholder is currently the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at The University of Chicago. This position was assumed in 2011, after 12 years as Director of the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art. Stockholder was at the forefront of the Yale MFA, which nurtured some of the most progressive US-based artists of the last decade.

Jessica Stockholder lives and works in Chicago, IL. Recent exhibitions and installations include Door Hinges at Kavi Gupta Chicago (2015), Rose’s Inclination at Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago (2015), Palpable Glyphic Rapture at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris (2015); Angled Tangle at Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami Beach, FL (2014); Once Upon a Time at EXPO Chicago, Chicago, IL (2014); Erstwhile & Notwithstanding at C.Ar.D: Contemporary Art and Design, Pienello, Italy (2014); Glimpse at Galleria Raffaela Coretese, Milan, Italy (2014) and Like Water If Pond As Lily at UCSF Medical Center, Mission Bay, San Francisco, CA (2014).

She has exhibited widely in North America and Europe, at such venues as the Dia Center for the Arts, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Open Air Museum in Belgium, the Power Plant in Toronto, Canada, the Whitney Museum of American Art; P.S. 1, New York; SITE Santa Fe; the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; 1301PE Gallery in Los Angeles and Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery in New York. Her work is represented in various collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. She has received numerous grants including the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Anonymous Was A Woman in 2012. She received her BFA from the University of Victoria in Canada in 1982, her MFA from Yale University in 1985, an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Emily Carr College of Art in 2010, and an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Columbia College in 2013.

Text courtesy Kavi Gupta.