Jessica Stockholder facts for kids

Jessica Stockholder, Lay of the Land, Installation view; orange plastic shopping baskets, driveway mirrors, oriental carpet, wooden stools, acrylic paint, pendant lights and bulbs, hardware; 275 x 345 x 350 cm; Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands; 2019.

Jessica Stockholder (born 1959) is a Canadian-American artist known for site-specific installation works and sculptures that are often described as "paintings in space." She came to prominence in the early 1990s with monumental works that challenged boundaries between artwork and display environment as well as between pictorial and physical experience. Her art often presents a "barrage" of bold colors, textures and everyday objects, incorporating floors, walls and ceilings and sometimes spilling out of exhibition sites. Critics suggest that her work is informed by diverse artistic traditions, including abstract expressionism, color field painting, minimalism and Pop art. Since her early career, they have noted in her work an openness to spontaneity, accident and marginality and a rejection of permanency, monetization and disciplinary conventions that Stephen Westfall characterized as an "almost shocking sense of freedom."

Stockholder has shown at the Dia Art Foundation, Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, and Venice Biennale. Her work belongs to numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Art Institute of Chicago, British Museum, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Anonymous Was A Woman and National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She lives in Chicago with her husband, painter Patrick Chamberlain, and is a professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

Early life and career

Stockholder was born in Seattle in 1959 and raised in Vancouver, Canada. Her parents, Fred and Kay Stockholder, were English professors at the University of British Columbia. As a teen, she took private drawing lessons with sculptor Mowry Baden, a friend of her father's with whom she formally studied later at the University of Victoria (BFA, 1982). Her undergraduate work focused on painting, but explored nontraditional approaches beyond the picture frame, involving objects, boundaries and architecture that remain central to her art. An often-cited early work, Installation in My Father's Backyard (1983), for example, incorporated painted objects affixed or adjacent to her father's garage, including a double mattress, cupboard door, roll of chicken wire, and rectangular patch of painted grass.

In 1983, Stockholder enrolled at Yale University where she studied with Judy Pfaff, Jake Berthot, Mel Bochner and Ursula von Rydingsvard, among others, and earned an MFA in 1985. Her work at Yale was often ephemeral and ambiguous regarding boundaries between artwork and architecture. Her subsequent Kissing the Wall sculptures (1987–90) continued this approach with stand-alone objects, engaging intervening spaces between wall and artwork with mirrors and attached lamps that cast colored light on walls and structures. After graduating, Stockholder moved to Brooklyn. She attracted recognition in the late 1980s through exhibitions organized by PS1, Mercer Union (Toronto), The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), and soon after, American Fine Arts (New York), Le Consortium (France), the Whitney Museum (including the 1991 Biennial), and Renaissance Society (Chicago), among others.

Other professional activities

Stockholder has curated several shows of her own work and others. These shows took place at Gorney Bravin & Lee (2003), Tang Museum ("The Jewel Thief," co-curated with Ian Berry, 2010), Kavi Gupta ("Assisted," 2015), The Contemporary Austin (2018, work by Robert Davidson), Centraal Museum (with Laurie Cluitmans, 2019), and OGR Turino (2021).

From 1999 to 2011, Stockholder was director and professor of graduate studies in sculpture at Yale University. She was faculty chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago from 2011 to 2018, and is currently director of graduate studies.

Recognition

Stockholder has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996); awards from the Lehmbruck Museum in Germany (2001), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Lucelia Artist Award, 2007), Anonymous Was A Woman (2012), and American Academy of Arts and Letters; and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and Canada Council. She was elected to the National Academy of Design in 2011, and awarded honorary doctorate degrees by Emily Carr College of Art and Columbia College Chicago, in 2010 and 2013, respectively.

Stockholder's work belongs to the public collections of American museums including MoMA, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA LA, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Gallery of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum. It belongs to the international collections of the British Museum, Carré d'Art, Centraal Museum, GAM Torino, Le Consortium, Lehmbruck Museum, Mumok, Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou), National Gallery of Australia, Städel, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Vancouver Art Gallery, among others.