We are delighted to announce that our McKinney Visiting Artist Series lecture with Jen Bervin will now be held via Zoom.
Jen Bervin’s complex yet elegant multidisciplinary work results from poetic and conceptual investigations of material, and results from research and collaboration with artists and specialists ranging from material scientists to literary scholars. Her collaborative works activate the intersections of art and scholarship; text and textiles; culture, craft, science and technology, and feminist modes of reading, writing, and listening.
Bervin’s work has been exhibited internationally–the subject of solo exhibitions in Hong Kong at the University Museum of Art Gallery (HKU), and the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, and the Granoff Center for the Arts at Brown University, her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; The Power Plant, Toronto; Artisterium, Tbilisi; The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and MASS MoCA.
Her publications include ten books and artist books, most recently Silk Poems–a long-form poem presented both as a book (Nightboat Books) and as an implantable biosensor made from liquefied sik developed in collaboration with Tufts University’s Silk Lab. Silk Poems was a New Museum Book of the Year and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Other books include Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickenson’s Envelope Poems with Marta Werner (Christine Burgin/New Directions), a Book of the Year selection by The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, and Hyperallergic; and the widely taught book Nets (UDP).
She has earned numerous awards, fellowships, and grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art (2017). The Rauschenberg Residency (2016), Asian Cultural Council (2016), Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artist Program (2016), Bogliasco Foundation (2014), Creative Capital (2013), The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2012), New York Foundation for the Arts (2007), Camargo Foundation (2006), and MacDowell Colony (2006).
Bervin was an invited Artist in Residence at the Alice Kaplan institute for the Humanities (2018), sponsored by the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, where she taught in the Art Theory & Practice Department, and is currently the inaugural 2018–2019 Provost Fine Arts Fellow at Rhode Island School of Design, sponsored by RISD Glass. She is also an Artist in Residence with SETI Institute, a program that facilitates an exchange of ideas between artists and scientists and expands upon SETI Institute’s mission to explore, understand, and explain the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe.