Jacquelyn Gleisner, M.F.A.

Jacquelyn Gleisner headshot
Practitioner in Residence
Seton Gallery Director Coordinator, Art

Department of Art & Design
College of Arts and Sciences
Education

M.F.A., Cranbrook Academy of Art

B.F.A., Boston University (summa cum laude)

Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, Italy

About Jacquelyn

Jacquelyn Gleisner holds an M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and a B.F.A. with honors from Boston University. Jacquelyn was awarded a Fulbright grant to Finland in 2010 to study pattern and surface design across fashion, architecture, and fine art. In 2015 she was invited to participate in an artist's exchange in Botswana through the Art in Embassies Program.

Jacquelyn gave public lectures and workshops in Gaborone and Maun over ten days and her painting, Scroll VII, 2015, was included in a three-year curated exhibition at the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Botswana, Earl R. Miller. In addition to her studio practice, Jacquelyn writes about contemporary art and has been a regular contributor to the Art21 Magazine since 2011. She has launched two columns for the site, "Praxis Makes Perfect" and "New Kids on the Block." She was the Guest Editor of the Sincerity Issue (Volume 11, July/August 2015).

Her works have been shown abroad in Italy, Finland, and Botswana and in the United States, especially throughout the New England area.

Artist Statement

I am interested in patterns, surface design, and decoration. The impulse to decorate and embellish is present in ancient textiles and other forms of handicraft. Yet throughout history, cultural perceptions of ornament, color, and decoration have varied. Patterns and color have the ability to conflate or open space, to entice or repel a viewer. In 2014 I began developing a series of scrolls, based on patterns that mimic weavings and other forms of handiwork. The scrolls represent a harmony of opposites, a union of aesthetic traditions rooted in both craft and fine art contexts with references to tropes of abstract painting, especially from the 1960s and 1970s. Explicitly created on paper—a material structure that is accessible yet fragile—these scrolls are photographed in natural and constructed environments. Inside a parking garage or on a bed of snow, the scrolls become interwoven in a community and a specific setting, presenting alternative narratives about how paintings exist in this world. Recent iterations of the scrolls have been repurposed into site-specific installations. By reusing older works, the structure of my practice becomes a pattern and repetitive cycle of creation and destruction.

Awards & Grants

2015 Artist Exchange, Art in Embassies Program, Botswana, Africa

2010 William J. Fulbright Post Graduate Research Grant, Helsinki, Finland

2010 Aalto University, Visiting Researcher, Helsinki, Finland

Artist-In-Residence / Residencies

2016 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, VA 

2016 A.I.R. Studio Paducah, Kentucky 

2014 Studio 550, Manchester, New Hampshire

Selected Solo Exhibitions / Installations

2017 Folds of the Cloak, Sharon Arts Center, Peterborough, NH

2017 Paper Over, Artspace, New Haven, CT

2017 Ouroboros, Mazmanian Gallery, Framingham State University, MA

2016 Pop Up Show, Downtown Rochester, NH. (Organized by the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts, Rochester, NH)

2014 Sunshine Art & Design Gallery, Lancaster, PA

2011 Galleria Atski, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

Selected Group Installations

2017 Interaction of Color, Ann Street Gallery, Newburgh, NY

2016 Studio 550, Manchester, NH

2015 Art in Embassies, Botswana, Africa

2015 Minumental, New Hampshire Institute of Art, Manchester, NH

2014 Flat Files Year Two, TSA Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2014 The Principle of the Thing, Daylight Savings Gallery / Sadie Halie Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2014 Parallel Grounds, Daylight Savings Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2011 Artists of Fulbright, FinnFest

2011, San Diego, CA

2010 Out of the Woods, M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI

2010 Daimler Financial Services One Year Collection, Farmington Hills, MI

Symposiums / Conferences / Panels

2017 CAA Conference, Presentation: "The Writing Artist," New York, NY

2011 America in Living Color, Speaker – Contemporary Finnish Textile Design, Tampere, Finland

2010 American Voices xviii, Lecturer, Turku University, Turku, Finland

Selected Publications

"In Poor Taste," Jani Leinonen: Funeral Notice. Galerie Gmurzynska: Zurich, 2011. 

Knuckles, Dawud and Russell Simmons, eds. The Art Album: Hip Hop And The Visual Arts. Fiell Publishing Limited: New York, 2012. 

Woolston, Samuli, ed. The Aalto Ornament Studio: Theory as a Design Tool, Ornament in Architecture, A Research Based Design Studio, Aalto University, School of Engineering, Department of Architecture: Helsinki, 2011.

Selected Press

"Art Teacher's Lengthy Installation Challenges Assumptions about Art," West Hartford News,  February 2, 2017.  

Conant, Ben. (2017, June). "Making Her Point." Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.  

Slater, David. (2016, February). "Art in Embassies." Peolwane, 59 - 65.

Collections / Commissions

Private collections (USA): AR, CT, FL, GA, MA, MI, NY, WA

Kathy Battista, Program Director, Sotheby’s Institute New York

U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Botswana, Earl R. Miller

In the Media