Education and Training
B.A., University of California, Santa Barbara
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
M.F.A. Rutgers University
Research Interests
Jennifer Parker’s sculptures, performances, and installations are inquiries into the essential nature of things. Parker’s aesthetic might be dubbed unnatural naturalism. She employs a wide range of media to develop the limits of and context for her sculptural practice. Underscoring her outlandish work is a rueful sense of the contemporary, urbanized mind unable to comprehend, and long out of touch with the forces of nature. Parker maintains a lucid deadpan humor, supplying tidbits of explanation to spell out her often comedic motives.
For Parker, being an artist means being an activist, thinker, historian, and teacher who blends found objects, sound, and digital media with organic materials and traditional sculpture fabrication techniques to ask questions and to tell stories.
Selected Publications
Jennifer Parker is a practicing artist living in Oakland, CA. Her work has been exhibited and presented nationally and internationally in places such as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Southern Exposure in San Francisco, CA; the Bessie Schöenberg Theater in New York; the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington; the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, CA; the de Baile in Amsterdam, Holland; The War Memorial Museum in Seoul, Korea; the World Trade Center in Osaka, Japan; and the Iskra History Museum in Kazanlak, Bulgaria.
She has been the recipient of visual arts fellowships from Art Matters, the New Forms Regional Grant administered by the Inter-Arts Program of the NEA, The New Jersery State Council of the Arts and the Kate Neal Kinely Memorial Fellowship Award.
Teaching Interests
The body, Conceptual Art, bug collections, & power tools
Jennifer Parker