Jennifer Bolande (born 1957) is an American

postconceptual Post-conceptual, postconceptual, post-conceptualism or postconceptualism is an art theory that builds upon the legacy of conceptual art in contemporary art, where the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take some precedence over traditional ...

artist.Ollman, Leah
"Jennifer Bolande: Cut up the newspaper, and random connections make for some unexpected depth,"
''Los Angeles Times'', December 15, 2018. Retrieved January 15, 2024.Stone, Katie
"Jennifer Bolande,"
''Frieze'', March 2005, p. 120–23. Retrieved January 16, 2024. Her art explores affinities and shifts of meaning among sets of objects and images across different contexts and media including sculpture, photography, film and installation.Cameron, Dan
"Jennifer Bolande,"
''Artforum'', Summer 1995. Retrieved January 16, 2024.Nisbet, James
"Jennifer Bolande,"
''Artforum'', October 2010. Retrieved January 15, 2024.Vogel, Wendy
"Jennifer Bolande, ICA, Philadelphia,"
''Artforum'', December 10, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2024. She emerged in the early 1980s with work that expanded on ideas and strategies rooted in

conceptualism In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical ...

Pop Pop or POP may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Pop music, a musical genre Artists * POP, a Japanese idol group now known as Gang Parade * Pop! (British group), a UK pop group * Pop! featuring Angie Hart, an Australian band Album ...

Arte Povera Arte Povera (; literally "poor art") was an art movement that took place between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s in major cities throughout Italy and above all in Turin. Other cities where the movement was also important are ...

and the so-called

Pictures Generation ''The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984'' was an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York City that ran from April 29 – August 2, 2009. The exhibition took its name from ''Pictures'', a 1977 five person group show organ ...

.Marincola, Paula
"Something to Do with Jennifer Bolande,"
''Artforum'', January 1989, p. 70–73. Retrieved January 15, 2024.Siegel, Katy
"Jennifer Bolande: Appliance House,"
''Artforum'', January 2000. Retrieved January 16, 2024.Maul, Tim. "Jennifer Bolande at Alexander and Bonin," ''Art in America'', May 2008. Her work focuses on thresholds, liminal and peripheral spaces, and transitional moments—states she enacts by the repetition, accumulation and recontextualization of found materials.de Brugerolle, Marie. "Scoping Things on the Cutting Edge: A conversation between Jennifer Bolande and Marie de Brugerolle," ''Mousse Magazine'', Fall 2018, p. 82–89. She frequently selects cultural artifacts on the verge of obsolescence or in flux—and thus acquiring new meanings—and archives, studies and reframes them.Grabner, Michelle
"Jennifer Bolande,"
''Artforum'', September 2010. Retrieved January 15, 2024. ''Artforum'' critic Paula Marincola wrote, "Bolande's highly individualized amalgam of sculpture and photography proceeds obliquely but precisely toward an accumulation of possible meanings. She is a connoisseur of unlikely but evocative details, of subliminally perceived, fragmentary images and events." Bolande's work belongs to the collections of the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

(MoMA),Museum of Modern Art
Jennifer Bolande, ''Globe Sightings: St. Marks Place, NYC''
Collection. Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's ori ...

(MOCA),Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Jennifer Bolande
Artist. Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...

,Centre Pompidou
Jennifer Bolande, ''Double landscape''
Collection. Retrieved January 15, 2024. and

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art, modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art ...

(SFMOMA).San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Jennifer Bolande
Artist. Retrieved January 15, 2024. She has exhibited at MOCA, the

Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía The ''Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía'' ("Queen Sofía National Museum Art Centre"; MNCARS) is Spain's national museum of 20th-century art. The museum was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992, and is named for Queen Sofía. I ...

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art art gallery, museum near Water Tower Place in the Near North Side, Chicago, Near North Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is on ...

and

MAMCO The MAMCO () is the contemporary art museum of Geneva, which opened in 1994. The building is a former factory building, with 3000 m2 of exhibition space, it is the largest contemporary art museum of Switzerland. From 1994 to 2015, MAMCO was dire ...

, among others.Crimp, Douglas and Lynne Cooke (eds). ''Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present''], Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010.Molesworth, Helen (ed). ''This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s'', Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. In 2007, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Jennifer Bolande
Fellows. Retrieved January 15, 2024. She is emerita professor at UCLA and is based in Los Angeles and

Joshua Tree, California Joshua Tree is a census-designated place (CDP) in San Bernardino County, California, United States. The population was 6,489 at the 2020 census. At approximately above sea level, Joshua Tree and its surrounding communities are located in the Hig ...

.UCLA Department of Art
UCLA Department of Art Faculty
Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Education and career

Bolande was born in 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio. She earned a BFA from

NSCAD University NSCAD University, also known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), is a public art university in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The university is a co-educational institution that offers bachelor's and master's degrees. The unive ...

. After initially working in dance,

choreography Choreography is the art of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which Motion (physics), motion or Visual appearance, form or both are specified. ''Choreography'' may also refer to the design itself. A chor ...

and drawing, she turned to found material from the media and urban landscape, influenced by the 1977

Artists Space Artists Space is a non-profit art gallery and arts organization first established at 155 Wooster Street in SoHo, Manhattan, New York City. Founded in 1972 by Irving Sandler and Trudie Grace and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts ...

exhibition, "Pictures." She received recognition for this work in the 1980s and 1990s through solo exhibitions at

The Kitchen A kitchen is a room used for the preparation of food. Kitchen, or The Kitchen, may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Films * ''Kitchen'' (1966 film), an American film * ''Kitchen'' (1997 film), a Hong Kong film * ''The Kitchen'' (1961 film ...

,Westerbeck, Colin
"Jennifer Bolande,"
''Artforum'', Summer 1982. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Artists Space,Lawson, Thomas
"Victor Alzamora and Jennifer Bolande,"
''Artforum'', March 1983. Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Gallery Nature Morte Peter Nagy (born 1959) is an American artist known for his post-conceptual art of the 1980s and as an active art gallerist. He is the owner of Gallery Nature Morte, which was founded in New York City's East Village in 1982 and was part of the ...

Grundberg, Andy
"Jennifer Bolande,"
''The New York Times'', September 12, 1986. Retrieved January 16, 2024. and

Metro Pictures Metro Pictures Corporation was a Film, motion picture production company founded in early 1915 in Jacksonville, Florida. It was a forerunner of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The company produced its films in New York, Los Angeles, and sometimes at le ...

in New York,Johnson, Ken. "Jennifer Bolande at Metro Pictures," ''Art in America'', October 1988, p. 193–94.Cotter, Holland
"Jennifer Bolande,"
''The New York Times'', May 5, 1992. Retrieved January 16, 2024. and

Margo Leavin Margo Leavin (1936–2021) was an American art dealer. She was born in New York, but spent her career in Los Angeles. In 1970, she opened the Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood, CA, which she operated until it closed in 2013. Career and rep ...

in Los Angeles.Geer, Suvan
"La Cienega Area,"
''Los Angeles Times'', June 23, 1989. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Bolande's later solo exhibitions have taken place at

MoMA PS1 MoMA PS1 is a contemporary art institution at 2201 Jackson Avenue in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens in New York City, United States. In addition to its exhibitions, the institution organizes the Sunday Sessions performance series, th ...

John Gibson Gallery The John Gibson Gallery was a contemporary art gallery in New York City, in operation from November 1967 to 2000, and founded by . Early on, the gallery specialized in selling contemporary monumental–sized sculptures. History Precursor T ...

, Alexander and Bonin and Magenta Plains in New York,Cotter, Holland
"Jennifer Bolande,"
''The New York Times'', March 17, 1995. Retrieved January 16, 2024.Princenthal, Nancy. "Jennifer Bolande at Alexander and Bonin," ''Art in America'', January 2000, p. 113.Maul, Tim
"Jennifer Bolande: Persistence of Vision,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', June 2023. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Pio Pico Gallery (Los Angeles),Berardini, Andrew
"Jennifer Bolande at Pio Pico,"
''Artforum'', March 2019. Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Fotohof Fotohof is a Salzburg-based non-commercial gallery and publishing company specialising in contemporary fine art photography. Its sponsoring body is the Association for the Promotion of Auteur Photography, founded in 1981. FOTOHOF ''gallery'' ...

(Salzburg), Kunstraum Munich and Kunsthalle Palazzo (Switzerland), among others.Teibler, Claudia. "Ganz genau hinschauen," ''Münchener Merkur'', June 12, 1995.Hoffmann, Justin, and Phillip Ursprung. ''Jennifer Bolande'', Basel/Liestal: Kunsthalle Palazzo, 1995. Her 2010 retrospective at INOVA ( Institute of Visual Arts) traveled to the

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia The Institute of Contemporary Art or ICA is a contemporary art museum in Philadelphia. The museum is associated with the University of Pennsylvania, and is located on its campus. The Institute is one of the country's leading museums dedicated t ...

and the

Cal State LA California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) is a public research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. It is part of the California State University system. Cal State LA offers 142 bachelor's degree programs, 122 m ...

Luckman Gallery. A monograph, ''Jennifer Bolande, Landmarks'', was published in conjunction with the retrospective.Bankowsky, Jack, Rosetta Brooks, Ingrid Schaffner, Nicholas Frank, Christina Valentine and Dennis Balk
''Jennifer Bolande, Landmarks''
Geneva: JRP, Ringier, 2011. Retrieved January 15, 2024. She was also featured in the inaugural

Desert X Desert X is a site-specific, contemporary art exhibition that is held in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. The inaugural Desert X was held from February 25 to April 30, 2017, and has held subsequent exhibitions every two years. The nex ...

biennial (2017) and a MoMA screening of two of her films in 2022.Desert X
Jennifer Bolande, ''Visible Distance / Second Sight''
Retrieved January 15, 2024.Museum of Modern Art
"An Evening with Jennifer Bolande,"
Events. Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Work and reception

The foundation of Bolande's art has been an inductive, often additive process operating in the space between photography and sculpture. Her inquiries often involve perception and the quirkiness of physical phenomena, exploring subjects across different media, while marking and collapsing distinctions between objects, images, memory and embodied experience. There is often a sense of filmic expectation and potentiality in her work, of events just completed or about to occur; some writers have deemed them "frozen movies."Makary, J. Louise

''Incite!'', August 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2024. While certain tendencies in Bolande's art link her to the Pictures Generation (media consciousness, appropriation), critics note qualities that set the work apart from that group's cool criticality and slickness: its warm, often absurd humor and lack of cynicism; a near-obsessive attachment to idiosyncratic subjects; a funky, cast-off,

lo-fi Lo-fi (also typeset as lofi or low-fi; short for low fidelity) is a music or production quality in which elements usually regarded as imperfections in the context of a recording or performance are present, sometimes as a deliberate stylistic ch ...

aesthetic; and an elusive inner logic.

Photographic and assemblage works, 1980–2008

In the 1980s, Bolande's art centered on found image and object assemblages that ''New York Times'' critic

Holland Cotter Holland Cotter is an American writer and co-chief art critic with ''The New York Times''. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Life and work Cotter was born in Connecticut and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. fr ...

described as "a kind of controlled recycling characterized by low-key wit, lively inventiveness and a subtle eye for metaphor." The work explored processes of reproduction and reception involving sound and sight, accumulating oblique meanings by stacking, resizing and reframing fragmentary, intangible and peripheral events and motifs—among them, the ignored furniture in porn movies, inert

Marshall amplifiers Marshall Amplification is a British company that designs and manufactures music amplifiers, speaker cabinets, and effects pedals. Founded in London in 1962 by shop owner and drummer Jim Marshall, the company is based in Bletchley, Milton Key ...

and speaker cones, vintage refrigerator doors.Weinstein, Matthew A
"Jennifer Bolande,"
''Artforum'', November 1988. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Her exhibitions often functioned like catalogues of ideas: piled binary relationships involving texture and color, points of simultaneous meeting and division, dichotomies of medium, and emotional and psychological oppositions whose syntactic richness suggested poetry lines and verses (e.g., ''Stack of Shims'' and ''Marshall's Stack'', 1987). ''Milk Crown'' (1987) was an early exemplar of her method, exploring an image through a "life cycle" of various physical and experiential states. It was a delicate cast-porcelain rendering of

Harold Edgerton Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990), also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with ...

's iconic, high-speed 1957 image of a splashing milk drop in which she converted the ephemeral into the solidly permanent, commenting on the original's effort to capture the invisible. In subsequent works, Bolande paired related motifs to different effect. Her exhibition "Road Movie" (1995) played with boundaries between real and aesthetic objects, juxtaposing photographs of brightly colored, full-sized trucks in odd formations with shots of toy trucks, their scale indicated by a human index, such as a finger; arranged in a kind of jump-cut sequence, the images suggested the sense of narrative and total control endemic to both film direction and child's play. ''Appliance House'' (1998–99) matched two 1950s relics once premised on newness and defined by the cube—

Lever House Lever House is a office building at 390 Park Avenue in the Midtown East neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Constructed from 1950 to 1952, the building was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merr ...

, the eponymous soap company's landmark

International Style The International Style is a major architectural style and movement that began in western Europe in the 1920s and dominated modern architecture until the 1970s. It is defined by strict adherence to Functionalism (architecture), functional and Fo ...

office tower, and a cut-rate Lower East Side appliance store—each representing opposite ends of Manhattan's East Side and the laundry-soap business. The architectural, stainless-steel framed sculpture featured backlit night photographs of windows revealing high-modernist office interiors or rows of used washing machines that ''Artforum's'' Katy Siegel noted for their "spooky melancholy," humanity and loneliness. In ''Earthquake'' (2004), Bolande revisited the cube, loudspeakers and washer/dryers in two rhyming works—a film and a stacked assemblage. Her "Smoke Screens" exhibition (2008) featured small groups of tinted photographic prints of smoke placed on large sheets of plywood. She played the Rorschach-like textures of the wood grain off those of the prints; a conical plaster tabletop sculpture, ''Plume'' (2007), froze an image of smoke in form and time.

Public artworks

Bolande reprised the plywood visual theme in her first public-art project, ''Plywood Curtains'' (2010), a series of installations presented in vacated storefronts throughout Los Angeles.Knight, Christopher
"Jennifer Bolande @ West of Rome,"
''Los Angeles Times'', September 30, 2010. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Inviting both a double take and acknowledgment of an ongoing economic downturn in viewers, she hung drapery printed with the graphic image of plywood inside the empty windows, mimicking the familiar sight of boarded-up storefronts. The site-specific Desert X project, ''Visible Distance/Second Sight'' (2017), invited another double take that encapsulated Bolande's collapsing of images, the cinematic and embodied experience. It consisted of three double-sided highway billboards that reproduced her enlarged photographs of the distant San Jacinto, Santa Rosa and San Bernardino mountain ranges. They were placed and scaled in order to facilitate what critic Christopher Knight called a "fleeting, disconcerting moment" for drivers in which "the wordless pictures line up exactly with the approaching view."Knight, Christopher
"International Art Invades the Suburban Coachella Valley: The Best of 'Desert X,'"
''Los Angeles Times'', March 9, 2017. Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Later exhibitions

Bolande's project "The Composition of Decomposition" (2018–20) offered a subtle elegy on newspapers and the news itself.Khraibani, Sahar
"Jennifer Bolande: The Composition of Decomposition,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', April 2020. Retrieved January 15, 2024. It began with ''Image Tomb'' (2014), an examination of history as a vertical accumulation of layers, represented by a stack of ''New York Times'' newspapers through which she tunneled by cutting a deep rectangular channel to excavate a picture of skeletons below. She used the excised pieces to create the project's centerpiece, a film composed of roughly 400 pairs of side-by-side fragments ordered in their original sequence, which appeared and faded in a rhythmic flow set to a score of percussive found and synthesized sounds. ''Los Angeles Times'' critic Leah Ollman called it a "subtly provocative" new form—evoking found poetry and early modernist abstractions—that "reduced the ''Times'' to a confetti of elusive clues" revealing connections of unexpected depth. In the exhibition, "Persistence of Vision" (2023), Bolande presented photographs of patiently observed, impermanent moments (often interventions of light), near-topographic portraits of single white facial tissues ("Monoliths"), and plaster sculptures of iceberg- or cliff-like forms ("Drifts") that visually rhymed with the tissue images.Knoblauch, Loring
"Jennifer Bolande: Persistence of Vision @Magenta Plains,"
''Collector Daily'', May 25, 2023. Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Collections and recognition

Bolande's work belongs to the public collections of the

, Hammer Museum,Hammer Museum
Jennifer Bolande, ''The Times''
Collection. Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Israel Museum The Israel Museum (, ''Muze'on Yisrael'', ) is an Art museum, art and archaeology museum in Jerusalem. It was established in 1965 as Israel's largest and foremost cultural institution, and one of the world's leading Encyclopedic museum, encyclopa ...

(Jerusalem),The Israel Museum
Jennifer Bolande, ''Orange''
Collections. Retrieved January 15, 2024.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...

,Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Jennifer Bolande
Collections. Retrieved February 2, 2024.

(Geneva),MAMCO Genéve
Jennifer Bolande, ''Digital''
Collection. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Milwaukee Museum of Art,Milwaukee Museum of Art
Jennifer Bolande
Artist. Retrieved January 15, .

Moderna Museet Moderna Museet is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. In 2009, the museum opened Moderna Museet Malmö in Malmö. History The museum opened in Stockh ...

(Stockholm),Moderna Museet
Jennifer Bolande
Artists. Retrieved January 15, 2024. MOCA (LA),

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the list of largest art museums, 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 painting ...

,Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
''Appliance House'', Jennifer Bolande
Collections. Retrieved January 15, 2024. MoMA,

Palm Springs Art Museum The Palm Springs Art Museum (formerly the Palm Springs Desert Museum) is a visual and performing arts institution with several locations in the Coachella Valley, in Riverside County, California, United States, founded in 1938. PSAM has been focu ...

Pérez Art Museum Miami Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)—officially known as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County—is a contemporary art museum that relocated in 2013 to the Maurice A. Ferré Park in Downtown Miami, Florida. Founded in 1984 as the Cent ...

, and SFMOMA. She has received a

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation is a private foundation formed in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died on April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Gr ...

fellowship and grants from the

Canada Council The Canada Council for the Arts (), commonly called the Canada Council, is a Crown corporations of Canada, Crown corporation established in 1957 as an arts council of the Government of Canada. It is Canada's public arts funder, with a mandate to ...

, Tesuque Foundation,

New York Foundation for the Arts The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is an independent 501(c)(3) charity, funded through government, foundation, corporate, and individual support, established in 1971. It is part of a network of national not-for-profit arts organizations ...

, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Durfee Foundation and Andy Warhol Foundation.''Art Daily''
Plains announces representation of Jennifer Bolande,"
News, June 1, 2020. Retrieved January 15, 2024.UCLA Department of Art
Jennifer Bolande
Faculty. Retrieved January 15, 2024.New York Foundation for the Arts. ''Directory of Artists' Fellows & Finalists'', New York: New York Foundation for the Arts, 2021.Durfee Foundation
Jennifer Bolande
Awardee. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Jennifer Bolande is represented by the New York City gallery Magenta Plains.
Jennifer Bolande at Magenta Plains

References

External links

Jennifer Bolande official websiteJennifer Bolande
Vimeo
Scoping Things on the Cutting Edge: A conversation between Jennifer Bolande and Marie de Brugerolle
''Mousse Magazine'', 2018

''Milwaukee Journal Sentinel'', 2010
Jennifer Bolande interview
WePresent, 2017 * Bolande, Jennifer
"Remembering Jack Goldstein,"
''Afterall'' , Spring/Summer 2003. {{DEFAULTSORT:Bolande, Jennifer 21st-century American women sculptors 21st-century American sculptors Post-conceptual artists 1957 births Living people Artists from Cleveland UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture faculty NSCAD University alumni