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".Kino, Carol. "Go Ahead, Play With (And On) the Art," The New York Times, June 14, 2009. Retrieved January 6, 2022.Asthoff, Jens. ["Jessica Stockholder: Peer Out to See,"] Artforum, December 2010. Retrieved January 6, 2022.Schwabsky, Barry. "The Magic of Sobriety," Jessica Stockholder, London: Phaidon Press, 1995. Retrieved January 12, 2022. 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.Barliant, Claire. "Jessica Stockholder: Redefining the Frame," Sculpture, April 2005, p. 35–9.Westfall, Stephen. "Jessica Stockholder by Stephen Westfall," Bomb, October 1992. Retrieved January 6, 2022.Celant, Germano. Installations in Symbiosis: Jessica Stockholder, London/New York: Phaidon Press. Retrieved January 12, 2022. Her art often presents a "barrage"Molesworth, Helen. "Jessica Stockholder," Frieze, September 5, 1996. Retrieved January 6, 2022. of bold colors, textures and everyday objects, incorporating floors, walls and ceilings and sometimes spilling out of exhibition sites.Kimmelman, Michael. "Exuberantly Operatic, In Scale and Emotion," The New York Times, October 6, 1995, p. C28. Retrieved January 6, 2022.Tillman, Lynne. "Lynne Tillman in Conversation with Jessica Stockholder," Jessica Stockholder, London: Phaidon Press, 1995. Retrieved January 12, 2022. Critics suggest that her work is informed by diverse artistic traditions, including abstract expressionism, color field painting, minimalism and Pop art.Smith, Roberta. "Jessica Stockholder," The New York Times, April 14, 1995, p. C4. Retrieved January 6, 2022.Solomon, Deborah. "Domesticity Is Bliss," Time, p. 48–9, July 12, 1999.Pagel, David. "Between Pragmatism and Idealism: Jessica Stockholder's Radically Democratic Installations," Jessica Stockholder: White Light Laid Frozen/Bright Longing and Soggy Up the Hill, Odense, Denmark: Kunsthallen Brandts, 2005 Retrieved January 14, 2022. 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".Cooke, Lynne. "Fabricating sight/site," Jessica Stockholder, London: Phaidon Press, 1995. Retrieved January 12, 2022.Avgikos, Jan. Jessica Stockholder," Artforum, October 2003. Retrieved January 6, 2022.Arnesano, Giuseppe Amedeo. "Interview with Jessica Stockholder| What is normal," ATP Diary, August 17, 2021. Retrieved January 14, 2022.
Stockholder has shown at the Dia Art Foundation,Van de Walle, Mark. "Jessica Stockholder/Dia," Artforum, April 1996. Retrieved January 7, 2022. Centre Pompidou,Tillman, Lynne et al. Jessica Stockholder, London/New York: Phaidon Press. Retrieved January 12, 2022. Whitney Museum of American Art,Knight, Christopher. "Four Floors of Evolution: The '91 Whitney Biennial divvies up painters, sculptors and photographers from the ‘50s to the '90s floor by floor--and the curators' conceit works," Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1991. Retrieved January 6, 2022. MoMA PS1,Johnson, Ken. "Contrasts in Sculpture, In Theme and in Medium," The New York Times, February 21, 2006, p. E5. Retrieved January 5, 2022. and Venice Biennale.Conti, Tiziana."Biennale di Lione," Tema Celeste (Milan), October–December 1997, p. 61. Her work belongs to numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),The Museum of Modern Art. Jessica Stockholder, Artists. Retrieved January 6, 2022. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA),Knight, Christopher. "MOCA on the Rebound? Three Strong Shows and Free Entry are Welcome Signs of Change," Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2019. Retrieved January 14, 2022. Art Institute of Chicago,Art Institute of Chicago. Jessica Stockholder, Artists. Retrieved January 6, 2022. British Museum,The British Museum. Jessica Stockholder, Collection. Retrieved January 6, 2022. and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Jessica Stockholder, Coupling, Collection. Retrieved January 7, 2022. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation,John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Jessica Stockholder," Fellows. Retrieved January 6, 2022. Smithsonian American Art Museum,Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Jessica Stockholder, Lucelia Artist Award Winner – 2007," Awards, 2007. Retrieved January 7, 2022. Anonymous Was A WomanAnonymous Was A Woman. Recipients to Date. Retrieved January 7, 2022. and National Endowment for the Arts, among others.Ivey, Bill, Nancy Princenthal and Jennifer Dowley. A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment of the Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001, p. 239. She lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, painter Patrick Chamberlain, where they moved in 2024 when she retired from teaching at the University of Chicago.University of Chicago. Jessica Stockholder, People. Retrieved January 6, 2022.Carter, Evan. "COVID-19 and the Creative Process(es): Jessica Stockholder," New Art Examiner, June 2020.
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.Wilk, Deborah. "Mutable Feast," Art+Auction, November 2016, p. 73–8. Her work at Yale was often ephemeral and ambiguous regarding boundaries between artwork and architecture.Dafoe, Taylor. "Everyday Abstraction: A Q&A with Jessica Stockholder," Blouin ArtInfo, August 26, 2016. 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),Miller, Donald. "Victor Grauer, Kathleen Montgomery, Cady Noland, Jessica Stockholder," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 21, 1989. and soon after, American Fine Arts (New York), Le Consortium (France), the Whitney Museum (including the 1991 Biennial), and Renaissance Society (Chicago), among others.Mahoney, Robert. "Jessica Stockholder: Where it Happened," Sculpture, November/December 1990.Smith, Roberta. "Jessica Stockholder," The New York Times, March 2, 1990, p. C30. Retrieved January 6, 2022.Berbudeau, Eric. "Le Consortium s'expose," Nouvelle République, August 26, 1991.Johnson, Ken. "Generational Saga," Art in America, June 1991, p. 45–50.Dercon, Chris, et al. Jessica Stockholder, Rotterdam/Chicago: Witte de With/Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 1993.
Work and reception 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.Knight, Christopher. "A World of Pleasures," Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2001. Retrieved January 6, 2022.Kravagna, Christian. "Jessica Stockholder/Galerie Metropol," Artforum, January 1993. Retrieved January 7, 2022. Critics identify her key concerns as subjectivity, visual syntax and meaning-making, physical and temporal experience, and the upending of viewing habits and artistic conventions. David Pagel described her installations as "unglamorous inventories of readily available items [and] rambunctiously open-ended yet rigorously structured constellations", in which "unpretentious, anyone-could-do-it ingenuity bridges the gap between dreamy idealism and down-to-earth pragmatism".
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.Schambelan, Elizabeth. "1000 Words: Jessica Stockholder," Artforum, January 2006, p. 206–7. Retrieved January 17, 2022. 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. Helen Molesworth and Jack Bankowsky have identified a "cataloguing of avant-garde strategies" in Stockholder's art that they suggest has led to misreadings of her work in either purely formalist terms or sociological terms involving critiques of consumer culture, institutions or class.Bankowsky, Jack. "The Obligatory Bed Piece: Jessica Stockholder," Artforum, October 1990. Retrieved January 7, 2022. Bankowsky and Schwabsky contend that Stockholder chooses recognizable objects for their formal, material or typological attributes rather than literal or functional ones (e.g., versus Rauschenberg), yet deploys them without completely stripping their extra-artistic connotations.Städel. Jessica Stockholder, #358, 2001, Work. Retrieved January 7, 2022.
Michael Kimmelman, contrasting the irony and social commentary of installation contemporaries (Cady Noland, Jason Rhoades and Nancy Rubin), distinguished the "funky lunacy" and wit of Stockholder's work as more sensory, poetic, romantic and celebratory. Writers frequently note Stockholder's de-familiarization of the everyday as contributing to such qualities as well as states of disorientation and fantasy in her work. She achieves this through the juxtaposition of incompatible items, the use of color (intrinsic or applied) to assert unlikely connections, and a spatial approach that refuses any privileged vantage point. Germano Celant described this approach as questioning "the fragmentation of awareness and perspectives, in favor of an all-encompassing vision, devoid of hierarchies and boundaries". As a result, many critics interpret Stockholder's intent in terms of exploration or experimentation—in Miwon Kwon's words, "a both/and attitude rather than one of either/or"—that maintains contradictions.Kwon, Miwon. "Promiscuity of Space: Some Thoughts on Jessica Stockholder's Scenographic Compositions," Grey Room, Winter 2005, p. 52–63.
Early installations and sculpture