Jennifer Vanderpool

Southern California artist Jennifer Vanderpool

Southern California artist Jennifer Vanderpool is a soft-spoken rebel whose work gracefully inhabits the frontlines of identity politics. Her working process often explores her heartland roots where she was raised to be a gritty domestic goddess. She now employs her shopping skills to create multifaceted and sometimes-meandering installations that comment on domesticity, constructed environments, and pop culture. Vanderpool's work holds an eclectic assortment of contradictions in steady focus, seeming to be, and in fact being, both tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious at once. Her work has always been about deconstructing the appeal of mass-produced consumer goods, especially artificial, confectionery foods and the aesthetically related Technicolor toxicity of plastics. Once specifically focused on the sublimations, restrictions, and guilty pleasures of gender roles in the domestic/consumer continuum, recently her work has been concerned with the self-created, increasingly untenable situation of humans in general. 

Vanderpool has exhibited at museums and galleries in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Ukraine. Vanderpool has been awarded grants from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Danish Arts Council, Swedish Arts Council, and also received project funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant for her community intervention work.

Vanderpool's work has been written about in The New York Times, LA Weekly, Sculpture, Art Papers, Artweek, Art ltd., Angeleno, Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Houston Chronicle, Kansas City Star, Tulsa World, Dagens Nyheter, Politiken, El Universal, and El Tiempo, as well as numerous other national and international newspapers and magazines.

Vanderpool holds an Independent, Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Art Critical Practices from the University of California Regents in the fields of Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature,and Critical Theory. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she was a UC Regents Fellow.She has an MA in Community Arts Activism from The Ohio State University, MA in Art History from Emory University, and BA in History from Wittenberg University. 

To view Jennifer Vanderpool's work, please visit:http://www.jennifervanderpool.com/