Jessica Jackson Hutchins has shown in her work extensively in galleries and public institutions around the U.S. and internationally, including the Whitney Biennial (2010) and the Venice Biennale (2013). Her 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.
At MacDowell, she made a series of watercolor paintings indirectly related to the large installations of fused glass windows she created for the Carnegie museum in 2021. She also made a series of papier-mâché relief works on paper. Hutchins was awarded the Award of Merit Medal for Sculpture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2020. The Frye Museum of Art in Seattle in planning for a solo exhibition of Hutchins’ work in 2023.
