Jennifer Vanderpool

Visual Artist

A native of Northeast Ohio, working in Los Angeles, Jennifer Vanderpool creates artworks across the disciplines of design, sculpture, media, performance, and installations that integrate these mediums with historic popular culture. Her earlier work encompassed distinctions between natural and artificial. In the essay for Wanton, 2011, at Galería Sextante, Bogotá, art historian Dr. Kevin Concannon wrote: “With Jennifer Vanderpool’s sculptural installations it can certainly seem that ‘nothing succeeds like excess.’ While her ultra-baroque sensibility offers viewers a surfeit of visual and emotional pleasures, nothing is squandered.” In her current work, Vanderpool recontextualizes abstracted elements of historic material culture to create allegorical images.

She has been resident artist at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá; HOTHOUSE 2015, a UCLA/Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance residency; Pitzer College, Claremont; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena. She has been a visiting artist speaking at OVERGADEN: Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; University of Lincoln, England, UK; Universiteit van Amsterdam and Artez Institute for the Arts, Netherlands; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano and Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; California College of the Arts, Oakland; Indiana University at Bloomington; Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg; other U.S. universities.

Vanderpool’s curatorial projects engage socially constructed questions about the environment and belief systems as well as gender, ageism, and economics. She has curated exhibitions at the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Eyedrum in Atlanta, and the sadly defunct artist collaborative Bluemilk formerly located in Atlanta. Her curatorial project Imaginary Selves opened at the University of La Verne in February 2016. The exhibition included work by California based artists Jane Callister, Lisa Jevbratt, Việt Lê, James Van Arsdale, Canadian artist Brian McArthur, and Colombian artist Catalina Jaramillo Quijano. This exhibition questioned the socio-cultural emerging of self.

Vanderpool holds an Independent, Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in the Humanities and MFA from the Regents of the University of California, where she was a UC Regents Fellow. She was an Academic Fellow at Emory University where she earned an MA in Art History. Vanderpool also holds an MA in Community Arts Activism from The Ohio State University and a BA in History from Wittenberg University.

Jennifer