CAA News Today

The artist Jessica Stockholder will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago. The event will take place on Wednesday evening, February 12 from 5:30 to 7:00 PM in Hilton Chicago’s Grand Ballroom.

Free and open to the public, Convocation will also include the presentation of CAA’s 2014 Awards for Distinction, overseen by Anne Collins Goodyear, codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and president of the CAA Board of Directors.

An internationally exhibiting artist whose work has transformed the traditional conception of sculpture, Stockholder creates genre-defying multimedia installation pieces composed of commercially produced objects and referencing the bold, vibrant colors of painting. She is also an educator who spent twelve years at Yale University’s School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, most recently as director of graduate studies in sculpture. Stockholder joined the University of Chicago in 2011 as professor in the Department of Visual Arts, which she also leads as chair. Stockholder said the university’s lively intellectual atmosphere, as well as the building of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, were key factors in her decision to join the faculty.

Stockholder works at the intersection of painting and sculpture, often incorporating the architecture in which her work has been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, idiosyncratic, and formal—tempering chaos with control. She orchestrates an intersection of pictorial and physical experience, probing how meaning derives from physicality. Best known for her temporary site-specific installations, Stockholder has created work that has been discussed in relationship to the works of Robert Rauschenberg, Kurt Schwitters, Henri Matisse, and Paul Cézanne, as well as artists of the Cubist and Minimalist traditions.

Stockholder’s work has been shown in top museums, including the Dia Art Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in the United States, and the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Europe. She has also participated in numerous important group exhibitions, such as SITE Santa Fe, the Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago exhibited her installation Skin Toned Garden Mapping in 1991. In North America, Stockholder is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, 1301PE Gallery in Los Angeles, California, and Barbara Edwards Contemporary in Toronto, Ontario, and Calgary, Alberta. Barbara Edwards is currently showing new sculpture and work on paper in the Calgary gallery, on view through February 1, 2014.

Stockholder studied art at the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 1982 and earned an MFA from Yale University in 1985. Both Emily Carr College of Art and Columbia College Chicago have awarded her honorary doctorate degrees, in 2010 and 2013 respectively. In 2007, she received the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Before that Stockholder won a National Endowment for the Arts grant for sculpture in 1988 and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996.

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