Jessica Stockholder (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 was born in Seattle 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). 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.
Stockholder's installations and exhibitions combine found and purchased objects, zones of painted, carpeted or intrinsic color, and various framing devices into unified "walk-in paintings" that merge artwork and architecture, surface and support, and figure and ground.
Stockholder's work has been discussed in relation to the development of installation art and to art-historical traditions and figures including Cézanne and early modernism (e.g., Matisse, Cubism and Kurt Schwitters), Action, Color field and Hard-edge painting, Minimalism, Anthony Caro, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Rauschenberg. Critic Barry Schwabsky suggested that these precedents share with Stockholder a rejection of illusionism, an emphasis on the physicality of painting surfaces or objects, and a direct, aggressive use of materials.
Stockholder's sculpture from the 2000s has been characterized as more intimate, concise and less installation-driven than earlier work, with a balance of open space and formal rigor with looseness, improvisational freedom and painterliness.
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.
© 2024. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Jessica Stockholder or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only
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| Ms. Jessica Stockholder |
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| Your Skin in This Weather Bourne Eye-threads & Swollen Perfume, 1995 |
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| Your Skin in This Weather Bourne Eye-threads & Swollen Perfume, 1995 |
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| Inventory #286, 1997 |
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| With Wanton Heed and Giddy Cunning, Hedging Red and That’s Not Funny, 1999 |
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| With Wanton Heed and Giddy Cunning, Hedging Red and That’s Not Funny, 1999 |
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| Gelatinous Too Dry, 2000 |
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| Table Top Sculptures Series, 2003 |
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| Table Top Sculptures Series, 2003 |
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| Door Hinges, 2005 |
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| Door Hinges, 2005 |
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| Of Standing Float Roots in Thin Air, 2006 |
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| Just sew, 2009 |
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| Sailcloth Tears, 2009 |
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| Wide Eyes Smeared Here Dear, 2009 |
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| Color Jam, 2012 |
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| Once Upon a Time, 2014 |
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| Once Upon a Time, 2014 |
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| A Chord, 2015 |
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| Assist #2 Seal Lean, 2015 |
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Door Hinges, 2015
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| Smoke & Mirrors, 2016 |
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| The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, 2016 |
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| 3 squared @ half scale, 2018 |
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| Hinge Arrested at half scale, 2018 |
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| Hinge Arrested, 2018 |
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| Sidled, 2018 |
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| Squared from the river bank, 2018 |
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