Since the beginning of April, a serpentine platform has been sitting quietly at the Hutchinson Courtyard on the campus of the University of Chicago. Just over a foot elevated from the stone ground, about thirty feet long and sixteen feet wide, the platform is partially mustard yellow, adding a dash of aspiration for warmer weather; under the sprouting elm tree, its humble but striking presence is an invitation to participation. The platform is a sculpture by Stockholder called “For Events.” Coinciding with the occasion of Stockholder’s retirement from the university’s visual art department (DoVA), three graduate students, Jenny Harris, Clara Nizard and Michael Stablein Jr., spearheaded the organization of this exhibition and its unfolding programming spanning five weeks, in partnership with or with the support from numerous sectors of the university. Events include performances by Stockholder’s former students at Yale and UChicago, such as Anna Tsouhlarakis, Kevin Beasley and Devin T. Mays; campus- and community-driven performances by current UChicago students, selected through a call-for-submission process; and curricular engagements, which are class visits.

The fall art season has arrived, with its manic harvest of exhibitions, and also The Armory Show, the major art fair in New York City that shifted its schedule and venue last year, moving to this early-September date and the Javits Center. As my colleague Will Heinrich and I wandered the floor to pick these 13 favorites, we were drawn to work that seemed to move against the currents. Joanne Greenbaum’s abstract paintings — colorful and obsessive but with plenty of white space — are the eye-grabbers of this unusually coherent three-artist presentation. But Jessica Stockholder’s wonky mixed-media sculptures, sitting in the corners like mysterious forgotten projects, reward more thoughtful attention, as does the unrelenting contrast of red and blue in Brent Wadden’s loom-woven textile “paintings.” Large Rorschach blots painted directly on the booth walls by Stockholder tie it all together.

Teaching was a way to earn a living that intersected with and was supported by my own artwork. I’ve grown to appreciate that the conversation supported by the University of Chicago embodies values that are distinct from those of the commercial art world; the intersection of the two yields richness not found in either alone.

On the occasion of the three solo exhibitions dedicated to the drawing of Silvia Bächli, Allyson Strafella and Jessica Stockholder in the spaces of the Galleria Raffaella Cortese in Milan in via Stradella 7, 4 and 1, we interviewed one of the most important and influential protagonists of the international art scene.

Artists Pope.L, Catherine Sullivan, and I work together at the University of Chicago where we have each spent many hours engaging with the artwork of our students. The following conversation grows from my great respect for their thinking as I have come to know them over the past nine years. Both allow themselves to be vulnerable as they orchestrate with affection and humility encounters with others in search of their subjects. I am moved by their bravery. In contrast to their training in theater, mine was focused on visual arts. This contrast, like dye added to cells in a petri dish, makes visible the ways in which our formative experiences influence the contours of our thinking.

My own work is heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory and practice, in which I find openings to understand how meaning accumulates in flexible layers. I wondered if theater methodology provides a similar architecture for making sense of the complexity of human being. Perhaps all three of us are engaged in an effort to build a shared infrastructure that is in contrast to the rigidity of propaganda and our current polarized political situation.

I will likely have to teach online in the fall, so I have a keen interest in how they're doing. It's been interesting… I think that there [have been] some good things about it… One of my colleagues expressed yesterday that the students are able to make themselves more emotionally available online than they tend to in the classroom… I've been doing online studio visits with some of the MFA students; some of those conversations are really great. And I think that there's something about people being sort of slowed down and having to take stock and develop a new relationship to what they're doing that is productive.

The freedom she feels is palpable as you wander through “Digital Thoughts,” Jessica Stockholder’s laser-sharp exhibition at 1301PE gallery in L.A. Each of Stockholder’s 11 inventive assemblages is out of this world — if not from another planet then at least from far out in space. Some of Stockholder’s constellations of unrelated objects and materials are no bigger than notepads. Some are large, about the size of tents or picnic tables.

To marvel at a work by Jessica Stockholder is not only to examine her unorthodox assembly of the world’s kit, but to wonder where on earth she shops—where she gets such good deals? Her unconventional art supplies seem to either descend from outer space, or crawl up out of dumpsters. It’s as if junk—be it new or used—has no other purpose than to animate her dystopian sculptural choreography.

One imagines Stockholder stocking up, as it were. Like a chef instinctively sniffing out the freshest ingredients (the tackiest kitschiest artifacts), she’s confident that in time the right idea for their incorporation will come.

On the mezzanine, Jessica Stockholder’s brilliant monumental sculpture “White Light Laid Frozen” is like a painting pushed into three dimensions. Acquired two years ago, it is having its MOCA debut.

A horizontal white pedestal 23 feet wide and topped with white carpet supports 40 portable heating units, lined up like white sentinels beneath the icy white of a double row of fluorescent lights. Hovering above all that hot-and-cold purity, two ordinary metal office shelving units are suspended in space, held within a taut network of deep green bungee cords. Painted screaming yellow, the workaday world is elevated.

Barbara Kasten and Jessica Stockholder, presented by Bortolami and Galleria Raffaella Cortese at the “Generations” section, miart 2017
“We are both involved in asking questions about the limits of the forms that contain our work,” writes Stockholder of this artistic dialogue. “At the same time, we care deeply for the inventive and evocative space of the picture, and how that space has the capacity to reify emotional life.”

Kitty litter and coffee mugs, painted fur and tyre scraps: the materials lists for Jessica Stockholder’s sculptures read like the home inventory of a mad packrat. For three decades, Stockholder has taken as provocation that cliché ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ – incorporating even plumbing into anarchic assemblages that resolve as astonishingly balanced formal compositions. Exuberantly colourful and formally promiscuous, her work is deliriously enjoyable to look at.

In “The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room,” her show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in Chelsea, Jessica Stockholder playfully probes the intersection of edibility and sociability through a set of colorful assemblages. 

In The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, Jessica Stockholder’s scattered arrangements of sculptural elements play with assumed boundaries to become a fluid meditation on space.  Through a variety of materials and forms, Stockholder avoids overtly breaking down traditional artistic lines, so much as she highlights that they have never truly existed at all. 

In her third solo exhibition at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, Stockholder presents a multitude of studio pieces as well as a single “large-scale site-responsive installation.” By way of both found and bought materials, Stockholder reimagines the use and positioning of common objects in various bright colored displays. Think random, seemingly uninteresting items, like metal parts and yellow plastic pieces, curiously assembled to create a work that re-examines the relationship between materials.

In Jessica Stockholder’s first show at Mitchell Innes and Nash since 2012, the pioneering mixed-media artist presents a new series of her curious hybrids. She makes her pieces by combining found and purchased objects, then altering and embellishing them with her own artistic materials, adding paint, string and the like. 

The artist is presenting “a large-scale site-responsive installation” as well as repurposed works of found materials using tire scraps, rusty hinges, roofing tile, and other such objects ripe for reinvention for her third show at the gallery. The installation, which is a winding yellow-and-white viewing platform, puts gallery-goers at eye level in order to see a selection of elevated drawings “with a splash of color” in closer detail.

Jessica Stockholder’s colorful assemblages of diverse store-bought and found objects call to mind a term from neuroscience, “multisensory binding.” The phrase refers to the fact that the outer world appears to us seamlessly coherent, despite the many sensory signals streaming in from diverse sources — eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Usually we don’t notice how the mind binds together these different inputs. In Ms. Stockholder’s engaging, if not wildly exciting, show of sculptures at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, your awareness of your attention’s shifting between the disparate parts and the whole composition is essential.

Stockholder’s work — a mixture of the made, bought, found, and painted: domestic objects, toolbox goodies, backyard decks, urban markers, and, most recently, a multi-purpose stage-set, viewing platform and pedestal – is inventive, practical, funny and very down-to-earth.

Creased, tied, folded, pierced, draped and bound: the repertoire of operations that Jessica Stockholder applies in her handling of found and manufactured materials is seemingly infinite.
Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, Stockholder’s current exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash emphasises process, form, and, above all, gravity.

Jessica Stockholder’s work is difficult to talk about because it eschews so many of the typical classifications we use to discuss contemporary art: “installation,” “site-specific,” “ephemeral.” Indeed, that’s one of the most central elements of her practice: the dissolving of boundaries.
Look no further than her immersive new show at Mitchell Innes & Nash, “The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room.”

On view will be more of the Chicago-based artist’s oddball installations, which typically assemble various colorful, unlike objects. You could easily be tricked into thinking that these are all found objects, and that Stockholder put them all herself, but not so—she often deliberately selects her objects and relies on readymade materials.

Made when she was exiting grad school at Yale in the 1980s, the painted works on paper by Jessica Stockholder in this exhibition reveal a consistency in the artist’s practice, which focuses on the engagement of architecture, color and form. Rooted in Pictorialism, a late-19th century movement that emphasized artificial pictorial qualities, the works on view were made during the same period as the celebrated artist’s outdoor installation My Father’s Backyard, a seminal piece that saw the start of Ms. Stockholder’s unique style of fusing both painting and sculpture in the same work of art.

Jessica Stockholder is an artist known for breaking conventions. Though her sprawling artworks are often referred to as installations, she defines her manifold combinations of color and everyday materials as sculpture.

Everything Jessica Stockholder touches turns to art.

Over the past three decades this has included worn-out couches, an urban intersection, refrigerator doors, a scissors lift, fresh oranges and lemons, a compact car, a mattress, a streetlight, a bathtub, a full-size freezer chest, half-a-dozen wooden dressers and a city park.

Jessica Stockholder has unveiled new work at several Chicago locations this fall, including a site-specific installation at the Smart Museum of Art as well as in her solo exhibition “Door Hinges” and the group show “Assisted".

Wrapped around the dark gray exterior, a triangle painted with bands of vibrant color, a log, a segment of rope, an orange electrical cord, and two large convex safety mirrors reminded me of the visual dynamics of Fiorucci, the influential Manhattan fashion boutique that closed in 1986, just a few years before I would first encounter Stockholder’s work. Thanks to Google, I soon realized that the stylistic connection I had made on site wasn’t accurate at all, so it must have been the attitude of Stockholder’s bold on-the-street statement that provoked the association.

With exuberant, quirky and often kitschy creations, Jessica Stockholder has put a significant stamp on the medium of installation art.

"Jessica Stockholder talks about her work, which combines painting, sculpture, installation and language in a unique creation that calls for a close personal encounter with the viewer."

"Painting in Space" and "democracy in action:" it is between these two definitions, among the many possible, which can be used to describe the work of Jessica Stockholder (1959), an artist originally from Seattle, based in Chicago, who in this exhibition by Raffaella Cortese, in the space of 1 Via Stradella, presents a new collection of sculptures that showcase Stockholder's lively and formal vocabulary along with her playfully poetic elements.

One would never suspect that Jessica Stockholder's ivy-covered studio was originally a barn.

"I never stopped making paintings to start making sculptures," says Jessica Stockholder in the following interview.  "What I do is both painting and sculpture." 

Painting is the linchpin of art history. That’s why some thrill and some bristle when artists paint outside of the lines. We expect a painting to hang flat on a wall, to have a discrete rectangular surface, usually framed. We expect a picture. That format invites a particular interaction, in which we imaginatively enter the space it offers us.

Chelsea Jessica Stockholder Stockholder was left out of "Unmonumental," at the New Museum's inaugural show of assemblage-based sculpture, but the fifty-year-old artist helped pioneer the approach, whose roots reach back through Rauschenberg's "Combines" to Dada.

Influential collage artist Jessica Stockholder is the reigning queen of the found object -- especially shag carpet and plastics. Seven of her installations can be seen at MitchellInnes & Nash, along with, in Madison Square Park, her first U.S. outdoor installation -- a large, colorful, interactive sculptural platform that engages with nature and will appeal to children and parents alike.

Jessica Stockholder discusses the nuanced relationship between art and landscape.
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THIS LONG CENTURY is an ever-evolving collection of personal insights from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and cultural icons the world over. Bringing together such intimate work as sketchbooks, personal memorabilia, annotated typescripts, short essays, home movies and near impossible to find archival work, THIS LONG CENTURY serves as a direct line to the contributers themselves.

Jessica Stockholder has long been a proponent of the found object. Rather than Dumpster-diving for scruffy items full of ''character'' in the Rauschenberg tradition, she favors chintzy readymades: the staples of discount stores and, more pointedly, of a consumer culture geared toward planned obsolescence.

In this exhibition of works from 2006, Stockholder continues to transform commonplace objects into sculptural microcosms of saturated color and vivid form. While embracing a looseness that endows her work with a sense of improvisational freedom, Stockholder does not hide the fact that there is a method to her mad, vibrant arrangements of plastic, furniture, light bulbs, or linoleum—to name only a few.