Faculty

Profile

Jen Mazza (born 1972, Washington D.C.) is a New York based artist who makes paintings and teaches at Parsons School of Design and the Pratt Institute. Her collaborative teaching integrates reading, artmaking and research across a range of disciplines, often focused on close visual analysis and problem-solving.

Mazza’s work often engages with pre-existing images to develop—as Walter Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project—“the art of citing without quotation marks.” By allowing things to speak for themselves through the medium of paint, Mazza attempts to gently undermine or tilt habitual structures of seeing and meaning making, drawing out what is overlooked in our relationship to images and objects.

Mazza received her B.A. in Visual Art and Spanish Literature from Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia (1994), and an M.F.A. in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (2001). Her work has been recently exhibited in a mid-career retrospective at The James Gallery at the Center for the Humanities, as a digital project for Artist Alliance Inc., and as part of her talk on art and nature at the Getty Museum.  Mazza’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art News, Art 21 and Hyperallergic. She is represented by Tibor de Nagy in New York.

Research Interests

Contemporary Art, Painting, Philosophy, Critical Theory, Collaborative Practice, Multimedia, Visual Culture, The Gaze, Observational Practices, and the Ethics of Aesthetics

Portfolio

jenmazza.com