25 Facts About Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett was an American artist and novelist.

Jennifer Bartlett was best known for paintings and prints that combine the system-based aesthetic of conceptual art with the painterly approach of Neo-Expressionism.

Jennifer Bartlett's father owned a construction company, and her mother was a fashion illustrator who left the field to raise her children.

Jennifer Bartlett grew up in the suburbs of Long Beach, close enough to the ocean that she developed an affinity for water, which would reappear in her mature work.

Jennifer Bartlett attended Mills College in Oakland, California, graduating with a BA in 1963.

Jennifer Bartlett then moved to New Haven to study at the Yale School of Art and Architecture at a time when minimalism was the dominant style.

Jennifer Bartlett studied with Josef Albers, Jack Tworkov, Jim Dine, and Richard Serra, receiving her MFA in 1965.

One writer noted that a central paradox of her work was that Jennifer Bartlett took the controlled, rationalist grid often favored by conceptual artists and used it to release an evocative torrent of imagery that was much in common with the Neo-Expressionist work of the 1980s.

Jennifer Bartlett had several retrospectives and survey exhibitions, the first in 1985 originating at the Brooklyn Museum and with more recent ones in 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art and 2014 at the Parrish Art Museum.

Early on, Jennifer Bartlett made a number of three-dimensional works that she subjected to extreme conditions such as freezing and smashing.

Jennifer Bartlett realized that she wanted something to draw on that was erasable but gridded like the graph paper that she and many other conceptual artists were using at the time.

Jennifer Bartlett came up with what is one of her signature materials: foot-square steel plates with a plain white baked enamel surface on which was silkscreened a quarter-inch grid.

Jennifer Bartlett had these fabricated in large quantities, and later worked with other sizes as well.

The subject matter consists of variations on what Jennifer Bartlett felt were the basic elements of art: four universal motifs, geometric forms, and color.

In 1980, Jennifer Bartlett began to work on a complex print project in collaboration with master printers in Japan.

Jennifer Bartlett later made her backyard garden in Brooklyn, New York, the focus of a similar series of diptychs.

Some pieces are diptychs in which Jennifer Bartlett explores the shifts visible in a landscape between two moments of time or seen from two slightly different angles of view.

Peter Schjeldahl, Ron Padgett, and other members of the poetry community that gathered at St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery encouraged Jennifer Bartlett to join them in reading her precise inventory of personal events and habits aloud, and she found an audience receptive to her literary minimal art work there.

In 1981, Jennifer Bartlett created Swimmers Atlanta, a 200-foot multimedia mural for the Federal Building in Atlanta, Georgia.

Jennifer Bartlett lived in both New York City and Paris.

Jennifer Bartlett died from acute myeloid leukemia at her home in Amagansett on July 25,2022, aged 81.

Jennifer Bartlett received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1983 and the American Institute of Architects Award in 1986.

Jennifer Bartlett was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1990 and became a full member in 1994.

Jennifer Bartlett's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Gallery, Benesse Museum and other institutions.

Jennifer Bartlett's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.