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

Join the mailing list

* All fields are required

Jenni Crain

Shifting Subjecthoods
Torrance Shipman, Brooklyn, NY
Jenni Crain, Laurie Kang, Linnea Kniaz, Valerie Snobeck, Wang Ye
April 14 – May 8, 2016

Torrance Shipman is pleased to announce Shifting Subjecthoods, an exhibition organized by Jenni Crain opening Thursday, April 14, 2016. The works within the exhibition beckon consideration of a lingering, which finds it’s footing not necessarily in the tangible tactility of the immediately registered but more so within the immaterial midst of the materials at hand. An in between and back and forth evocative of a breath, a reciprocal recycling of bodies in space upon space and such space upon such forms. The foreground grounded only by repeated fluctuations- these fluid variations the constant. An engagement.

Wang Ye refers to Landscape as Motive #39 as a moving landscape in brass. The gestures are taken from the flattened pictorial planes of traditional Chinese painting and translated into a spatial dimensionality. As the brass mountain ranges subtly move and mingle in space, the viewers’ very bodies become the environmental foreground, interacting with the landscapes as if engaged in a pas de deux. The two bodies contribute a mutual significance - a balance. (B. 1991 Changsha, China) lives and works in New Haven, CT. Ye received a BA in Design from China Academy of Fine Arts and is currently a MFA Sculpture candidate at Yale University School of Art. Valerie Snobeck’s peeled prints on plastic begin with the lamination of an image printed on paper. Through heat and vacuum pressure the top layer of ink is absorbed into the plastic surface - serving as a skin to protect the image. The plastic, once peeled, takes this image with it. The process, then repeated, another layer stripped from the source. The peels hover, hugging the wall - their dimensionality a mirror of their temporal substrate. The peel’s surface reflects the expressions of its given environment; until, again, it is stripped from its bearings- taking with it a material memory of that support whilst simultaneously a footprint of its own image remains. (B. 1980, Wadena, MN) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Reservoirs at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, China; Reservoirs at ESSEX STREET, New York, NY; and Vista Vista at Wallriss Kunstraum, Fribourg, Switzerland among others. Her work has been exhibited widely in important group and institutional exhibitions including but not limited to the 2014 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY and Basel Parcours, Switzerland, 2013. Snobeck received a MFA from University of Chicago and a BFA from St. Cloud University. Linnea Kniaz’s installations and wall paintings respond to the architectural affect of a given space. They become choreographed scenes as their rhythm moves the eye around the room, tracing not only the artist’s process and movement as she works, but also the subdued nuances of the space and the wall itself. (B. 1988 Chicago, IL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Soft Remove at Vacancy, Los Angeles, CA;Kniaz is currently a MFA candidate at California Institute of the Arts. Laurie Kang’s work investigates the conditions of/conditional materializations via a utilization of material implications. Her works support and explore the theory of intra-action- that beings and bodies come into existence inherently entangled with each other and through each other. Her knotted net works suggest this roving enmeshment - a neither / nor; while her frame-like works translate into a type of permeable architecture. (B. 1985, Toronto) lives and works in Toronto. Recent solo exhibitions include The C is Always Coming at Raster Gallery, Warsaw; Deferring Diffractions at 8-11 Gallery, Toronto; and Laurie Kang at Laurie Stump Projects, Toronto. Kang’s most recent group exhibition include collaborative project, The Mouth Holds the Tongue, with Nadia Belerique and Lili Huston-Herterich at the Power Plant, Toronto and Summertime in Paris: Spectiveretro at Parisian Laundry, Montreal. Kang received her MFA from Bard College in 2015. Jenni Crain’s photograph, Immersion & Accumulation, lends itself to an ongoing inquiry into the conceptual currents of “interior” and “exterior”. The photograph, taken from a research study on Saratoga Springs, New York, has been maximized to the dimensions of the artist’s own frame. As the image, captured from its original publication, is engorged, an intricate interlacing and articulation of various pores shift into visibility. (B. 1991, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Bent to Its Own Image at The Java Project, Brooklyn, NY; Upon Reflection at Y Gallery, New York, NY; The Air Is An Absence Held at Ray Smith Studio, Brooklyn, NY; and One Thing Then Another at Artist Curated Projects and Three Days Awake in Los Angeles, CA. Crain is the co-founder and co-director of Topless, a seasonal gallery based in Rockaway Beach, NY. Crain received her BFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2013.

01A-DSC7940-flat

Laurie Kang Slipper, 2016. Aluminum tube, theraband, metal rings, silicone. 130 x 77 1⁄2 x 2 inches. Detail

02A-DSC7939-flat

Laurie Kang Slipper, 2016. Aluminum tube, theraband, metal rings, silicone. 130 x 77 1⁄2 x 2 inches. Detail

03A-DSC7944-flat

Wang Ye Landscape as Motive #39, 2015. Brass. Left: Approx. 11 x 58 x 7 1⁄2 inches Right: 12 x 57 x 9 inches. Detail

04A-DSC7946-flat

Wang Ye Landscape as Motive #39, 2015. Brass. Left: Approx. 11 x 58 x 7 1⁄2 inches Right: 12 x 57 x 9 inches. Detail

05A-DSC7924-flat

Linnea Kniaz, Untitled (painting on 4 of Torrance Shipman’s walls), 2016. Acrylic on drywall and cinderblock. Dimensions vary. Detail

06A-DSC7920-flat

Jenni Crain Immersion & Accumulation, 2016. Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Museum Etching paper. 17 1/2 x 21 inches framed. Detail

07A-DSC7925-flat

Linnea Kniaz, Untitled (painting on 4 of Torrance Shipman’s walls), 2016. Acrylic on drywall and cinderblock. Dimensions vary. Detail

08A-DSC7884-flat

Laurie Kang Knot Net, 2016. Polymer clay. 23 1⁄2 x 12 1⁄2 x 1 1⁄2 inches. Detail

Valerie Snobeck Their Flowers, 2014. Peeled print on plastic. 43 x 28 3/4 inches. Detail

09A-DSC7880-flat
10A-Snobeck-Kniaz-Detail

Valerie Snobeck, Linnea Kniaz