BIO
For the last 24 years Jennifer Zackin has been integrating public art, sculpture, installation, performance, collaboration, ceremony, photography, video, collage, and drawing into acts of reverence and reciprocity. She seeks to engage and create community in her process, bringing art and ritual into everyday life. Her projects include communal weaving events, wrapping trees with brightly colored rope, growing medicinal herbs in a community garden, and creating absorbent tentacles ("hair booms") out of salvaged materials to clean-up toxic spills. In her recent series of sculptures titled Vortex Weaving, Zackin hand-knots and weaves colorful strands of rope or scraps of fabric on armatures constructed of salvaged materials. Inspired by the handwork of traditional weavers with whom she studied while living in rural India and Peru, Zackin develops innovative techniques by combining materials, process, and tradition.
Zackin’s work has been exhibited in museums nationally and internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Spertus Museum, Chicago, IL; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway; ICPNA, Cusco, Peru, Alianza Francesa, Lima Peru and the Zacheta National Art Gallery, Warsaw, Poland. She has received commissions from the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) for "TAPS" on Governors Island in NYC; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; River Valley Arts Collective at The Al Held Foundation, Boiceville, NY and MASS MoCA at the Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge, MA. Zackin is the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies, including Factory Direct, New Haven, CT in conjunction with Pinchbeck Rose Farm; Art Omi, Ghent, NY; Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL; and the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME.