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. She and her co-teacher, artist Dylan Gauthier, have recently contributed a chapter to a forthcoming book Teaching Artistic Research (De Gruyter, ed. Ruth Mateus-Berr and Richard Jochum PhD MFA). And in another collaboration of word and image, selected paintings appear alongside poems by Sampson Starkweather in his newest chapbook A Week in Late Capitalism / Ancient Capitalistic Proverbs just released by Blush. Most recently Mazza’s work was on view in her now shuttered solo exhibition “Attending to Particulars” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
Mazza’s work 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.
Significant awards include residencies at Yaddo (2005), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2006, 2005, 2004), Blue Mountain Center (2006), and the Jentel Foundation (2008, 2004). Mazza was also granted a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship to attend Millay Arts in 2004 and returned again in 2013. In 2001 and 2008, the artist received Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and in 2008 she was selected to be Artist-in-Residence at the Newark Museum. Her painting was the subject of an exhibition at the Jersey City Museum (2010), and her work is in the permanent collection of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.
Mazza received her BA in Visual Art and Spanish Literature from Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia (1994), and an MFA in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (2001). Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, ARTnews, Art21, and Hyperallergic. She is represented by Tibor de Nagy in New York.