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.

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.

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. 

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.”

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." 

Jessica Stockholder was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1959. She studied painting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and received an MFA from Yale University. Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Stockholder’s complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but close observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control.

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.

Trying to come up with a taxonomy for the burgeoning idioms of contemporary sculpture is probably ill advised. But one can't help wishing for a bit of handy nomenclature to categorize the abundance of recent work in which rigorously formal propositions achieve an odd, uneasy detente with, well, junk--tchotchkes, cast-offs, discount-bin merchandise.