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 her identity as a queer Jewish feminist and solo-parent.
Kendler is the current Artistic Fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature. From 2014 to 2024 she was the first Artist-in-Residence with Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
She is also a founding member of Artists Commit, an artist-led initiative to cultivate climate-consciousness in the artworld.
Kendler is a 2023 3Arts Awardee and alongside an interdisciplinary team, she was awarded a major Humanities Without Walls grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation for her community-engagement project Garden for a Changing Climate.
She sits on the Board of artist residency ACRE and the Board Fundraising Committee of international climate change organization 350.org.
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 projects have been exhibited at museums and biennials including Hayward Gallery (London), Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (Washington, DC), Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), 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 art projects for Governors Island (NYC), Eden Project (Cornwall, UK), and dlocations as diverse as urban riverwalks, remote deserts and tropical forests. In Chicago, her numerous public projects include Millennium Park for the Art Institute of Chicago, the Arts Club of Chicago, the Lincoln Park Conservatory for Experimental Sound Studio, and the '606' elevated trail for the Chicago Park District.
She has been invited to speak about her environmentally-engaged practice at universities, institutions and symposiums including the Smithsonian NMNH, The University of Chicago, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH), SxSW Eco (Austin, TX), the Goethe-Institut (Chicago), the Botanical Speculations Symposium (SAIC) and she delivered 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 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, among others. Kendler and her work have appeared on the cover of various newspapers: The Public (Buffalo), The Courier-Journal (Louisville), and on the cover of the Chicago Reader three times.
Her artwork and writing has also been featured in a number of published books, including An Ecotopian Lexicon, Sustainable Solutions from Oxford University Press and Why Look at Plants? by Dr. Giovanni Aloi.
Kendler has been on Newcity's 'Chicago's Top 50 Artists' list since 2018. 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 also runs the artist website platform OtherPeoplesPixels, which is offers carbon neutral websites for creatives.
VIDEO:
• Watch Kendler in conversation with Julie Reiss about her exhibition Other of Pearl for the Brooklyn Rail.
• Watch Kendler's short artist talk and panel discussion for EXPO Chicago's /DIALOGUES series alongside Australian ecological artist Katie West & curator Sharmila Wood.
• Watch Kendler's virtual program for Music for Elephants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History .
• Watch a short documentary by On the Real Film about The Playhead of Dawn.