Jennifer West
b. 1966, United States
Jennifer West (b.Topanga, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has explored materialism in film for over fifteen years. Significant commissions include works for LIAF Biennial (2022); Seattle Art Museum (2016-2017); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2016); The High Line, New York, NY (2012); MIT List Visual Arts Center (2011); Aspen Art Museum (2010); and Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London (2009).
West has had solo exhibitions and presentations at the Pompidou Center, Paris (2022); Times Square Arts, New York (2021); JOAN Los Angeles (2020); Contemporary Art Museum St Louis (2018); Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Seattle Art Museum (2016-2017); Museo d’Arte Nuoro, Sardinia (2017); Tramway, Glasgow (2016); S1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK (2012); Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany (2010); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, (2010); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2008); White Columns, New York, NY (2007). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Whitney Museum, New York, NY; Drawing Center, New York, NY; Barbican, London; Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt; Centre for Contemporary Visual Arts, Bordeaux; and ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, among others.
Her work is in museum and public collections such as and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kadist Foundation (San Francisco/Paris), Thoma Foundation (Chicago/Sante Fe); Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Depart Foundation (Rome); Kadist Collection (San Francisco/Paris); Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania; Henry Art Gallery (Seattle); Rubell Collection (Florida); Saatchi Collection (London), Getty Museum (Los Angeles), among others.
She has been an artist in residence at the SOMA, CDMX (2019); Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York (2014-15) and the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA (2011-12). She has curated exhibitions and programs from the collections of the Thoma Foundation (2023); LACMA (2017) and the Carnegie Museum of Art (2015) and curated moving image programs for Times Square Arts (2021) and MOCA Los Angeles (2019).
Her feature “Film Title Poem” was featured on MUBI worldwide (2020-2021). She was included in the 2012 LUX/ICA Biennial of the Moving Image, London, and the 5th Biennial of the Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium (2011) and has screened her work at the Whitney Museum, Oberhausen Film Festival, Tate Modern, Barbican London, Tate St Ives, ICA London and the Cinema Museum, London.
West received an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a BA from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, Frieze, Mousse Magazine, and Mubi Notebook. West has produced nineteen zine artist books, eleven of which are in the Getty Museum collection. She has lectured widely on her ideas of the “Analogital” and is an Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design in California. In 2022, a monograph on her work, Media Archaeology was published by Radius Books, funded by a grant from the Thoma Foundation.