Jennifer Zackin is a multimedia artist based in New York’s Hudson Valley. For more than twenty-five years, she has explored the intersections of craft and industry, abstraction and tradition, and art and climate change. Her practice encompasses sculpture, installation, performance, collaboration, ceremony, photography, collage, and drawing—often beginning with the framework of traditional handcraft and evolving into innovative new techniques.

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Her projects have included communal weaving events, wrapping trees in brightly colored rope, cultivating medicinal herbs in a community garden, and building absorbent tentacles (“hair booms”) from salvaged materials to help clean toxic spills. In her recent series of sculptures titled Vortex Weaving, Zackin hand-knots and weaves colorful strands on ready-made looms constructed of salvaged materials. Drawing inspiration from traditional weavers she studied with in rural India and Peru, she merges materials, process, and cultural traditions to forge original approaches. Her close engagement with materials creates a sense of alchemy and syncretism, transforming the familiar into the unexpected.

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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.

 

She is the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships and residencies, including Arts Mid-Hudson, Factory Direct, New Haven, CT (in conjunction with Pinchbeck Rose Farm); Art Omi, Ghent, NY; the Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL; and the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME.