Jennifer Mack-Watkins
Jennifer Mack-Watkins is a printmaker and art educator from Charleston, South Carolina. She is currently based in New York and New Jersey. Her work has been part of numerous group exhibitions, including the Whitney Houston Biennial in 2017, The Printmaking Center of New Jersey, The Knockdown Center, and Newark Arts Council among others. She has had solo exhibitions at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont and the Pratt Institution in Brooklyn.
Her work focuses on societal expectations of women. Body image, beauty images, gender roles, power structures, and relationships are other of the themes Mack-Watkins explores. She often uses images from vintage magazines, newspapers, and advertisements, and combines them with hand-drawn elements.
About her work in WOV II:
“No Place Like Home” (2020) is a collage that responded to the blatant racism and the pandemic, where she felt “everything kept happening like a tornado”. Inspired by dance poses of Judith Jamison and Jack Mitchell, illustrations by Jacob Lawrence, and the tornado scene from “The Wizard of Oz”, the collage depicts a woman struggling to keep the balance and weight of a house and the silhouettes of three people on top of it. The artist states: “As a way to navigate through these uncertain times I had to make my home a productive place to create for myself and a safe haven to keep my family safe from the outside world.” This work is an expression of how “no one can control the state of the world” and represents “the importance of family, keeping strength through the difficult moments, finding ways to be a joyful example for my family, and being hopeful.”
You can learn more about her at mackjennifer.com