Draft:Jill Slosburg-Ackerman

• Comment: Too much is sourced to primary sources. Lopifalko (talk) 20:31, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

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Jill Slosburg-Ackerman (b. 1948 in Omaha) is an American visual artist. She lives in Cambridge and works in Somerville, MA. Trained as a jeweler and a sculptor, she earned her BFA and MFA from the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. Her practice collapses conventional boundaries between works of art and the mundane.

Early life and career

Slosburg-Ackerman was born in Omaha, Nebraska. She is Jewish. She is inspired by the pragmatism of the pioneers who settled the Great Plains, and often cites her high school English teacher, Josephine S. Frisbie, also a native of Red Cloud, Nebraska for her connection to writer Willa Cather as early influences on her work. She is married to the art historian, the late James Sloss Ackerman and helped to edit his last works, including Origins, Imitation, Conventions, for which she also made a series of vignettes.

Slosburg-Ackerman, who now lives in Cambridge, began her career as a jeweler, then enlarged her scale to sculpture. Her work challenges the binaries between nature and culture, organic and man-made, 2-D and 3-D, art.

Her early work was exhibited at the Concord Art Association, in Concord MA, Harcus-Krakow-Rosen-Sonnabend Gallery, in Boston, MA, and Helen Shlien Gallery, Boston, MA. Her work is influenced by material culture and the decorative arts as well as the history of art, and shows work often outside of conventional art spaces. She studied at the School of the Boston MFA & Tufts University for both her BFA (1971) and MFA (1983).

Work

Slosburg-Ackerman is known for joining "disparate and opposing elements—nature to artifice, crafted objects to manufactured products, high art to low culture, art to design and craft—into hybrid sculptures." She uses simple and familiar materials: wood, paint, paper, and organic material. In much of her recent work, she joins one item with another and uses scrap from a past artwork to complete a new work. Her metaphysical, hybrid wood sculptures, installations, and drawings made from discarded furniture, saw dust, and wood scraps emanate from an examination of natural forms and phenomena.

Her work is interdisciplinary in nature, joining together disparate parts. Of her work, Slosburg-Ackerman says, "I draw as a sculptor, engaged in particular by issues of material, figure-ground relationships, and framing which are reflected by the constructed wood elements in each drawing." An example of this type of work appears in her "Framing Drawings" series, "hybrid works that collapse the boundary between a drawing and its frame through interacting carved and painted passages. "

She is specifically known for exploring the interaction between organic and human-made forms. A review of her work at the Worcester Art Museum, In Rome: The Pine Grove. And. Natura naturans; natura naturata" stated that Slosburg-Ackerman "clears unexpected pathways among these objects, and along the way uncorks the frothy ferment of imagination's process for the viewer to take in. [...] "In Rome" posits that nature and art are all part of the same creative force."

Forthcoming is Slosburg-Ackerman's Restless Shelves project, for which she created shelves installed in-situ in friends & community members' homes, was inspired by "Psychophant", a short story by Italian Jewish chemist Primo Levi. A publication re-issuing this essay alongside images of Slosburg-Ackermans work will be released in the Winter of 2023. She is professor emerita at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she taught from 1974-2018.

Exhibitions

Her work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, including at the Cohen Arts Center at Tufts University, Concord Center for the Visual Arts, the Cummings Art Galleries at Connecticut College, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fuller Craft Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Nightingale-Brown House at Brown University, the Rose Art Museum, UMass Dartmouth, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Awards and grants

Selected awards and grants include the Harvard Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Artist Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Haystack Mountain School of Craft Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Collections

Her work is held in the collections of: Boston Public Library, Boston, MA, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, J.L. Brandeis & Sons, Omaha, NB, City of Cambridge, MA, Daphne Farago, The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, Cambridge, MA, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, Robert Lee Morris, Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY, Simmons College, Boston, MA, Union Pacific Railroad, New York, NY, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.

Residencies

• 2022 Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA
• 2020 Open Studio Residency, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts
• 2009 Visiting Artist, American Academy in Rome

Publications

• JIlll Slosburg-Ackerman: In Rome: The Pine Grove. And. Natura Naturans; Natura Naturata.
• A Book of Walks, Deb Todd Wheeler, essay: "Two Walks".
• Restless Shelves and Psychophant
• Forthcoming Film: produced by VOCA (Voices of Contemporary Art).