Contemporary Installation artist, Jessica Stockholder was born in Seattle, Washington D.C., U.S., in 1959 and was brought up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In 1979, she was awarded a tuition scholarship from the University of Victoria from where she graduated in Fine Arts in the year 1982. Thereafter, she enrolled herself for Master’s in Fine Arts at Yale University and studied along with the likes of Jake Berthot, Judy Pfaff, Ursula von Rydingsvard, David von Schlegell, and George Trakas. Jessica Stockholder was given the ‘Susan H. Whedon Award’ in 1985 at Yale University. At the time when she graduated from Yale, she created her famous art-piece, the “Installation in My Father’s Backyard” in Vancouver, which had a remarkable utilization of large found objects, from her father’s garage, and paint.
Jessica Stockholder pursued sculpturing along with painting, using commonly available objects, such as fruits, left over plastic containers, yarn, and sheetrock. She used to add an aesthetic angle to her installations by assembling these items in a distinct manner and then painting them in vibrant shades. She made the not so useful and discarded items look meaningful and strikingly arty. Soon the installation artist pioneered a new dimension in Contemporary Art, called “Multimedia Genre-Bending Installations.” A complex blend of raw materials, colors, spaces, ideas, architecture, and graphics is what the eventual outcome is. Some wall using wires and electrical cords, giving the entire piece of art a vibrant touch, supports most of Stockholder’s work today.
In the 1970s, she studied with Mowry Baden, whose work had a major influence on her. Baten’s architectural constructions reflected bridges and passages through which the spectators moved. Jessica Stockholder graduated from paintings on canvass to the reliefs of cloth and wood before making her first large-scale installations in 1983. Nancy Doll and Terrie Sultan organized Jessica’s exhibition titled, “Kissing the Wall” that included twenty-two sculptures of varied sizes and five mono-prints. In the year 1989, her work, “Making a Clean Edge,” featured in a group show of studio artists. By 1997, Jessica was a visiting artist to several facilities such as Atelier Calder, Tours, France; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; University of Texas, and Fundaci¢ “la Caixa,” Spain. Jessica Stockholder’s second solo exhibition in 2006, at the P.S.1 contemporary Art Center, using waste and mass-produced items titled “Of Standing Float Roots in Thin Air,” was displayed at this exhibition.
The artist is currently based out of New Haven and is the Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale. Jessica Stockholder’s works have been exhibited internationally, including, at Dia Center for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense, Denmark.
