Jennifer Bolande

Jennifer Bolande (born 1957) is an American postconceptual artist. Her art explores affinities and shifts of meaning among sets of objects and images across different contexts and media including sculpture, photography, film and installation. She emerged in the early 1980s with work that expanded on ideas and strategies rooted in conceptualism, Pop, Arte Povera and the so-called Pictures Generation. Her work focuses on thresholds, liminal and peripheral spaces, and transitional moments—states she enacts by the repetition, accumulation and recontextualization of found materials. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Centre Pompidou, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). She has exhibited at MOCA, the Whitney Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and MAMCO, among others. In 2007, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is emerita professor at UCLA and is based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California.

Education and career Bolande was born in 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio. Artists Space, Gallery Nature Morte and Metro Pictures in New York, and Margo Leavin in Los Angeles.

Bolande's later solo exhibitions have taken place at MoMA PS1, John Gibson Gallery, Alexander and Bonin and Magenta Plains in New York, Pio Pico Gallery (Los Angeles), Fotohof (Salzburg), Kunstraum Munich and Kunsthalle Palazzo (Switzerland), among others. Her 2010 retrospective at INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Cal State LA Luckman Gallery. She was also featured in the inaugural Desert X biennial (2017) and a MoMA screening of two of her films in 2022.

Work and reception The foundation of Bolande's art has been an inductive, often additive process operating in the space between photography and sculpture. Inviting both a double take and acknowledgment of an ongoing economic downturn in viewers, she hung drapery printed with the graphic image of plywood inside the empty windows, mimicking the familiar sight of boarded-up storefronts.

Later exhibitions Bolande's project "The Composition of Decomposition" (2018–20) offered a subtle elegy on newspapers and the news itself. Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MAMCO (Geneva), Milwaukee Museum of Art, Moderna Museet (Stockholm), MOCA (LA), MoMA,

Jennifer Bolande is represented by the New York City gallery Magenta Plains.