Color Jam: Jessica Stockholder and Michael Darling in Conversation

Color Jam: Jessica Stockholder and Michael Darling in Conversation

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A pioneer of multimedia installations, Jessica Stockholder creates complex installations, sculpture, and collages that incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. On the occasion of her recent public art commission and in conjunction with the MCA’s exhibition Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity, MCA James W. Alsdorf Curator Michael Darling joins Stockholder in a conversation about her practice.

Commissioned by The Chicago Loop Alliance for this year’s Art Loop installation, Stockholder’s Color Jam applies colored vinyl to the buildings, sidewalks, and streets to create a volume of color in a Loop intersection. This is the third large-scale, outdoor public artwork commissioned by CLA; past commissions include Kay Rosen’s GO DO GOOD in 2011 and Tony Tasset’s Eye and Cardinal in 2010.

Stockholder is a professor of visual arts and chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. She is the former director of graduate studies in sculpture at Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at Dia Center for the Arts (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island City), SITE Santa Fe, the Venice Biennale, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, and Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) among others. Stockholder was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1959. She studied painting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and received an M.F.A. from Yale University.