The Jenni Crain Foundation

Jenni Crain (1991–2021) was an esteemed artist and curator who passed away suddenly due to complications related to Covid-19. She was widely recognized for her original minimalist sculpture and curatorial projects that championed under-recognized women artists as well as for her rigorous scholarship and writing. Crain was a passionate and tireless advocate of artists and art. Throughout her life, she built a vast community of friends, collaborators, and colleagues whose work she drove forward with generosity, sensitivity, and the deep probing intelligence with which she considered the world.

The Foundation preserves her legacy by supporting transformative projects by artists, curators, and writers of any age at early or pivotal stages of their career.

In honor of her memory, The Jenni Crain Foundation provides grants in two areas:
1. Finishing funds toward the completion of a significant project ranging from an exhibition, arts publication, or work of art across disciplines and forms.
2. Support for original research which may include travel, accommodation, and any funds required for accessing or studying materials.

Donations may be mailed to the address below or made online by clicking here.

A fundraising bandana featuring Crain’s work may be purchased by clicking here. An image of the bandana can be viewed by clicking here.

The Jenni Crain Foundation
130 Third Avenue Brentwood, NY 11717
info@JenniCrainFoundation.org

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Jenni Crain

Kate Millett: Terminal Piece
Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
April 3 – May 30, 2021

In 1972, artist, writer, and activist Kate Millett (1934–2017) presented Terminal Piece at the Women’s Interart Center in New York City. The exhibition emerged from Millett’s vehement critique of the deep-seated structures that instate violence within everyday experience. In restaging the original installation, Kate Millett: Terminal Piece extends a multiplicity of readings across temporal and spatial spheres, prompting visitors to consider how the issues Millett contested through her work persist today, nearly half a century later.

Millett is best known for her activism and writing, particularly her book Sexual Politics (1970), which became a key text of the second-wave feminist movement. Her multidisciplinary career challenged pervasive human rights violations, examining issues such as the influence of patriarchy as a process of marginalization, methods of isolation as forms of social control, and institutionalization as punishment for deviation from cultural norms. Her work revolted against the systems of power that condemn difference and govern access.

Millett’s Terminal Piece transforms the gallery into both an environmental cage and a stage. By manipulating the constructs of theatrical space, Millett subverts conventional modes of viewership and participation, effectively positioning her public both as spectator and as the spectated, as persecutor and as pawn. This set up destabilizes forms of agency and access, raising inquiry into constructs of complicity, surveillance, and demarcation as strategies of repression. Kate Millett: Terminal Piece provides an opportunity to reevaluate the roles that we each perform in perpetuating structures of injustice. For, in Millett’s words, “No system of oppression operates without collaborators.”

Special thanks to Sophie Keir and The Kate Millett Estate for their close collaboration and for making this exhibition possible. In addition to general support provided by CCS Bard, Kate Millett: Terminal Piece and the accompanying publication are supported by generous funding from the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Open Society University Network. Further thanks to Artists Space, New York, for kindly loaning its suite of chairs for the duration of the exhibition.

[1] Kate Millett, The Basement: A True Story of Violence in an American Family (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 4.

Installation views from Kate Millett: Terminal Piece, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, April 3 - May 30, 2021. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Jenni Crain. Photo: Olympia Shannon 2021.

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