Mentor Highlight: Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Jessica Jackson Hutchins lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Hutchins’ expressive and intuitive studio practice produces dynamic sculptural installations, collages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics, all hybrid juxtapositions of the handmade. As evidence of the artist’s dialogue with items in her studio, these works are a means by which the artist explores the intimacy of the mutual existence between art and life. Her transformations of everyday household objects, from furniture to clothing, are infused with human emotion and rawness, and also show a playfulness of material and language that is both subtle and ambitious. Based upon a willingly unmediated discourse between artist, artwork and viewer, Hutchins’ works ultimately serve to refigure an intimate engagement with materiality and form.

Hutchins had solo exhibitions at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH (2016); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2014); the Hepworth Wakefield Museum (2013); the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI (2013); and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA (2011). Significant group exhibitions include the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace (2013) and The Whitney Biennial (2010). Her work has been incorporated into public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Margulies Collection, Miami; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland.

Hutchins holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago