My goal is to reference handicraft, to capture people’s attention and encourage them to reconsider what they think is valuable.

Too often, women’s contributions were and still are overlooked. By championing women’s work and making it more visible, I hope to open people’s minds — to change the way people think about what art is and what it can be.

My process begins with found needlework. I then add gel-thickened paint and ultimately turn it from 2D to 3D. These sculptures resemble common household objects, curtains, tiles, tables sofas, beds and chairs. Sometimes installed as domestic interiors – rooms and frequently transformed into site–specific public art.

May 16-October 20, 2019
Curated by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim.

In September 2019, after returning from Dijon, France for the opening of Pattern, Crime and Decoration, look back to what the curators called “the last Artist-led American Movement. https://www.leconsortium.fr/en/pattern-crime-decoration

I began making paintings.

Maybe as a reaction to Pattern & Decoration and as a way forward, I painted. I still use the same methods and materials but with the addition of Navigational Charts. My first job in New York in 1975 was selling Navigational Charts.

Early pieces like New York Harbor, 2019 and Hudson & East River, 2019 highlight pattern with the addition of “drawing”. Pattern over time became less dominant, As I continued to work, painting took over.

I kept the charts, each one represents a personal connection, Plum Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island to name a few.

As Covid quarantined everyone and social injustice flared, my paintings continued to become less reliant on pattern and more painterly.

By spring, i had moved out to Long Island. I painted and went swimming. Swimming and places to swim became the theme…Night Swimming, Jelley Fish, Pond, Waterhole.

Increasingly organic and abstract, suggesting landscapes, these paintings satisfy my need to organize space, connecting the private to the public.

Charts remain for now but with the addition of bits of old beach towels, gel-thickened paint and lace.

Through an exploration of needlework, artist, Jennifer Cecere develops new forms and structures Imparting a feeling of handmade craft in New York City. “New York City taught me that art belongs everywhere. My goal is to reference handicraft in the built environment. The city is a perfect foil for my agenda. I have hung giant doilies in the trees at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; stenciled Jersey Barriers along the FDR [Drive]; suspended printed construction mesh at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal; and installed ‘Double Doily,’ a water jet sculpture, at PS1 Greenstreets, Long Island City.”

On August 11, 2015, my suspended sculpture, Chandelier, the winner of a national competition, was installed in the new Little Italy-University Circle Greater Cleveland Regional Transportation Authority. Inspired by a traditional crochet pattern, and fabricated in water jet steel. Chandelier occupies an atrium entrance to the station measuring 7.5’ x 5’x 15’.

I love the idea of starting something intimate and making it public.

The Station is located at the junction of two dynamic neighborhoods, which remains traditionally Italian; and University Circle, which is home to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Institute of Art, MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals. Designed by Cleveland –based City Architecture, the station is surrounded by historic structures, newer buildings and public spaces designed by firms that include Farshid Moussavi Architecture, James Corner Field Operations, Frank Gehry, Cannon Design, Phillip Johnson, Cesar Pelli and CNG Landscape Architecture, among others.

I was born in Richmond Indiana.

After studying at Cornell University at the school of Art Architecture and Planning, I moved to an industrial loft in lower Manhattan where I live and work today.

Until a generation ago, almost everyone practiced handwork. Women especially, knitted, crocheted and embroidered, girls learned by example. All of us then had a connection to these traditions. Not so much anymore. My work aims to integrate the flavor of domestic handiwork into the built environment.

Inagural Exhibition of the Newport Beach Sculpture Park, Newport Beach California.

Jennifer Cecere’s artwork aims to integrate a feeling of domestic handiwork into the built environment. Doilies were invented by industrious women to hide and protect worn and frayed furnishings (maybe feelings too). Through the variety of materials that they can be made from, the ways in which they can be displayed, and their references to a variety of subject matter makes doilies very diverse. This double–sided, doily–shaped bench enlivens this small park in the midst of a busy thoroughfare and new construction by taking something intimate and domestic and placing it outdoors. The handicraft of the bench demonstrates a familiarity with domestic materials that ties us with our fragile environment and revives traditions that when integrated with art and architecture reflect our hopes and dreams.

Textility is an exhibition that explores the inventive ways contemporary artists employ materials, concepts, and processes associated with textiles to convey their ideas. Many artists today are producing paintings and sculptures that resemble or reference textiles, using traditional materials like paint, canvas, wood, paper and glass.  Other artists are appropriating materials and techniques traditionally associated with fiber or textile arts—cloth or thread, crochet or embroidery, for instance—and using them to convey elements like color and line. And some artists are creating work that suggests fabric or textiles to incorporate a sense of the woven, knotted or stitched. Textility, a group survey of 28 artists, will examine art that draws from and is immersed in this textile sensibility.

Textility is co-curated by Mary Birmingham, Art Center Curator, and Joanne Mattera, a New York-based artist, curator, and art blogger. “Textility” is a word the curators created to express the idea of art that has some material or conceptual quality related to textiles.  Observing what they consider a trend in contemporary art, they conceived this exhibition to pose the questions: “Who is making work with fiber and textiles or work that suggests fiber and textiles?” and “How and why are artists doing this, and why now?”

Twenty foot, hand painted rip stop nylon “Doily” installed in a baseball back stop in the Bronx.

Until a generation ago, almost everyone practiced handwork. Women especially, knitted, crocheted and embroidered, girls learned by example. All of us then had a connection to these traditions. Not so much anymore but what does endure from my own experience, in addition to a love of needlework, is how intent my Italian grandparents were in weaving their children and grandchildren into the traditions of their new country. My work aims to integrate the flavor of domestic handiwork into the built environment.

“Antimacassars”: Lacey curves provide a foil for gritty construction barriers along the FDR Drive.

Pratt Sculpture Park, a three piece sculpture of laser-cut, hand painted rip stop nylon was suspended in the fountain courtyard between East Hall and Main Building.

St. Goerge’s Doily, 8’ printed construction mesh.

Heralding the gateway to and from St. George’s Staten Island, Doily marks the transition with a nod to all things domestic in sharp contrast to its surroundings.

 

Pattern, Crime & Decoration features the groundbreaking, artist-led American art movement Pattern & Decoration, which started in the mid-1970s and lasted until the mid-1980s. Often viewed as the last organized art movement of the 20th century, it chronologically straddles the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism, through its rejection of the rigid tenets of formalism and its embrace of decorative motifs and non-Western visual forms. Strongly grounded in feminism, it included many women artists and sought to highlight some kinds of arts and crafts often dismissed as belonging to the domestic or decorative sphere such as tapestry, quilting, wallpaper or embroidery.

Antimacassars and doilies were invented by industrious women to hide and protect worn and frayed furnishings (maybe feelings too). My grandparents (both sides) emigrated from southern Italy insisting on something better for their children. They brought with them cherished traditions, love of family, lacemaking, needlework, recipes and legendary stories.

Chairs/ Creative Stations/MTA/ArtsforTransit. Chairs installed in a “cage” in Union Square Station. Eight foot tall, Chairs encrusted with lace and gel-thickened paint appear fragile but are very strong. So strong they have to be contained in a cage!