The department of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design is excited to host Jennifer Vanderpool on Tuesday, April 18th! Join us in-person from 11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. in the Forum on Otis's Goldsmith campus for this special artist lecture and Q&A session.
A native of the Mahoning Valley in Northeast Ohio, working in Los Angeles and the Midwest, Jennifer Vanderpool values questioning equity issues through art-making. She fabricates prosthetic memories, knitting together stories from her grandparents, who immigrated to Appalachia to work in the coal mines and sweatshops, later moving to Youngstown, Ohio, to work in the factories in 1967. She weaves these anecdotes together with her experiences growing up in the Rust Belt in an attempt to understand the regional social history, deindustrialization, and traumas in post-prosperity communities. Her social art practice investigating the working class developed because she learned to embrace her disinvested hometown of Youngstown.
In the U.S. she has exhibited at Edward Cella + Architecture, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Wende Museum and Cold War Archive, Riverside Art Museum, Butler Institute of American Art, and other venues in Brooklyn, Houston, Atlanta, Kansas City, Tulsa, Los Angeles, and around Southern California.
