ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
October 11 – 26, 2022
Jana Harper
Jana Harper is an interdisciplinary artist, somatic practitioner, and educator whose work embraces the tensions between materiality and transcendence, chance events and human willfulness, and agency and relationality. In her creative practice, Harper aspires to establish conditions that invite viewers and participants to transform burdens of history—memories of painful or traumatic pasts—through gestures of recognition, empathy and naming. Originally trained as a printmaker and letterpress printer, language is central to Harper’s work and she is dedicated to non-hierarchical methods of creation and distribution. Jana’s practice is embedded with strategies that de-center the individual, and she is most at home in the spaces where disciplines overlap.
Recent performances include Cargas, the closing event for Intermittent Rivers at the 13th Havana Biennial, This Holding: Traces of Contact, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, and When We Gather, a multi-faceted project supported by Creative Time. Harper’s work is held in several public collections including the Library of Congress, the Sackner Archive for Visual and Concrete Poetry, the J.S. Blanton Museum, Proyecto Ace Print Collection, and the Janet Turner Print Collection.
An enrolled member of the Mackinac Bands of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Harper is Associate Professor of the Practice at Vanderbilt University.
Artist Statement
While in residence, Jana will be exploring the geography around Good Hart, learning about local Anishinaabe history, and continuing her practice transforming ancestral and historical data into visual language(s).
Images courtesy of the artist
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