About.
Jeanne Jaffe is a multi-disciplinary artist
working in installation, sculpture, and stop motion animation. Her work is influenced by an interest in language, literature, psychology, and history and explores how we construct identity, our world and our value systems.
Ms. Jaffe is Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and has been a visiting artist each fall semester at Xian Academy of Fine Arts in Xian, China for the past five years.
Ms. Jaffe is the recipient of fellowship grants for Outstanding Artistic Development from the Gottlieb Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mid Atlantic/NEA. the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Independence Foundation, the Leeway Foundation, Mino Artist Residency in Japan, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation, among others.
Works by Ms. Jaffe have been exhibited nationally and internationally at such places as Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Hillwood Art Museum, Mino Washi Ikari Museum in Japan, Michener Art Museum, The Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh, Scotland, the Seokdang Museum of Art in Korea, and the London Craft Council Gallery in England.
She has recently moved to south Florida where she has shown at LNS Gallery, Doral Art Museum, Coral Springs Museum, IS Projects, IPC ArtSpace, Hollywood Art and Culture Center, the Mexican Consulate, the Arts Warehouse, the Camp Gallery, Collective 62, and the Miami Dade College Art Gallery.
Her work has been reviewed extensively, including in Art in America, The New York Times, and Sculpture Magazine.
Ms. Jaffe’s work is included in private and public collections in Pennsylvania Academy of Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pa. the Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Collection in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, N.J, the Abington Sculpture Garden, Abington, Pa., Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking, New Brunswick, N.J, and Museum of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y.
Artist Statement
Inspired by an interest in language, literature, psychology, and history, my work explores how identity is forged from early, pre-verbal, experience through the later influences of language and history and cultural conditioning. In the sculptures based on pre-verbal experience, I give concrete form to intangible sensations and barely recalled bodily memories. This is accomplished by creating hybrid forms of mixed origins of experience - fusions of animate and inanimate worlds, simultaneously familiar yet strange. Body fragments, vegetative processes, and microscopic life fuse, mutate, and morph, and the resulting objects invite recognition, while remaining mutable, suggestive, and indeterminate.
In later installations such as” Little Red Riding Hood as a Crime Scene”, “Elegy for Tesla “, and “Eliot’s Four Quartets”, popular folktales, history, and literature are reimagined through a contemporary lens and made into multi-sensory environments. In these installations, sculpture, videos, interactive elements, and animation create a space for exploring the implications of these known narratives and for reimagining new perspectives.
My work challenges cultural assumptions and reinterprets old stories and beliefs to provoke fresh ways of thinking, and new options of action, behavior, and agency in order to move towards a state of psychological freedom, enjoyment, and agency. How we create meaning and self-determination from the cacophony of sensation, memory, myth, language, and cultural history is the subject of all my work and how we become who we choose to become.
