ABOUT THE ARTIST
Photo Credit: Ash Thompson for SAIC Magazine
Jenny Kendler (b. 1980, New York City) is an interdisciplinary artist, environmental activist, naturalist & wild forager who lives in Chicago and various forests. She works from the perspective of a queer Jewish feminist and single parent.
Kendler is the current Artistic Fellow with Center for Humans and Nature. From 2014 to 2024 she was the first Artist-in-Residence with Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
She is a founding member of Artists for Chicago and Artists Commit, an artist-led initiative to cultivate climate-consciousness in the artworld.
She serves on the Board of Directors for the global climate organization 350.org, for the artist residency ACRE and ArtsFIRST Chicago, launching in 2026 as the city’s first community arts foundation.
Kendler is a 2023 3Arts Awardee, and with an Gallery 400, she was awarded a major Mellon Foundation Humanities Without Walls grant for Garden for a Changing Climate.
Kendler holds a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006) and a BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art (2002, summa cum laude).
Her work has been presented widely, including at Hayward Gallery (London), the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (Washington, DC), Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Neubauer Collegium (Chicago), Vielmetter (Los Angeles), Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco), La Box (France), AKG Museum (Buffalo, NY), MSU Broad Museum (Michigan), Futurium Museum (Berlin), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), Oxford University Museum of Natural History (Oxford, UK), California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco), DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India) and the inaugural Chicago Biennial.
Kendler has been commissioned to create public projects for Governors Island (NYC), the Eden Project (Cornwall, UK), and landscapes ranging from as city riverwalks to remote deserts and tropical forests. In Chicago, her many public projects include works for Millennium Park with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Arts Club of Chicago, the Lincoln Park Conservatory with Experimental Sound Studio, and the '606' elevated trail with the Chicago Park District and the Trust for Public Land.
Kendler has spoken about her environmentally-engaged practice at universities, museums and convenings including the Smithsonian NMNH, the University of Chicago, the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH), SxSW Eco (Austin, TX), the Goethe-Institut (Chicago), the Botanical Speculations Symposium (SAIC) and as the closing lecture at the Shapiro Research Symposium (SAIC)
Kendler's solo project Other of Pearl was a Critic's Notebook pick on the front page of the print edition of The New York Times. Her work has also been covered in The New Yorker, Artnet, Art in America, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, The Chicago Tribune, The American Scholar, and in a special Earth Day feature for Mashable. She has been interviewed by NPR, BBC Radio and Chicago's ABC7 News. Kendler and her work have appeared on the covers of The Public (Buffalo), The Courier-Journal (Louisville), and thrice on the cover of The Chicago Reader.
Her artwork and writing appear in numerous books, including Butterfly (Phaidon), An Ecotopian Lexicon ( University of Minnesota Press), Sustainable Solutions (Oxford University Press) and Why Look at Plants? (Brill) by Dr. Giovanni Aloi.
Kendler has been named to Newcity’s “Chicago’s Top 50 Artists” list annually since 2018 and entered the Hall of Fame in 2025. From the 2020 edition:
"Jenny Kendler has mastered the art of leveraging elements from the nonhuman natural world—be it amber, kudzu or a whale’s ear bone—into pieces that draw us to examine the nuances of our surroundings. Kendler’s work is as pervasive as nature itself. Her project “1000 Flags/1000 Waters,” in which blue flags are dispatched to communities advocating for clean water, was featured in the MCA’s exhibition “Water After All.” A selection of sculptures on threatened bird species will be shown at Vienna’s Dom Museum, and “Music for Elephants,” a score played on an ivory-keyed piano that counts the number of elephants poached for their tusks, will be featured in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Her first museum solo exhibition opens at the MSU Broad Museum in January 2021 and includes a piece that highlights how the structure of venomous sea snail’s shell directly contradicts the theory of intelligent design. As an activist, Kendler takes her works to the streets through movements like Extinction Rebellion, where she incorporates communal art activities into environmentalist nonviolent direct actions. In this moment where the call for social justice is high, she is pushing to articulate the connections between the social and the environmental in support of a unifying movement toward justice."
In addition to her artistic and activist practice, Kendler runs the website platform OtherPeoplesPixels, which offers carbon-neutral websites for artists.