Barbara Rita Jenny, artist, Portsmouth

Barbara Rita Jenny was born in Newark, New Jersey and, in the mid 1980s, attended Phillips Exeter Academy where she was a recipient of the Germain Glidden Prize for Excellence in Art and graduated with High Honors. Afterward she became a Visual Studies Major with concentrations in both Film Studies and Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College. She received her Masters of Fine Arts in Studio Art and Critical Theory from Maine College of Art in 2002.

Jenny taught in the art department at Phillips Exeter Academy from 1994 to 2004, and was an instructor at the Exeter Center for Creative Arts (ECCA) as well as its Executive Director in the late '90s. Jenny also led the ArtRocks! effort to build a community stage in Portsmouth's Rock Street Park, participated in the VSA mural project in the Portsmouth Parking Garage, which was granted a Mayor's Award, and served on Mayor Sirrell's Blue Ribbon Committee for Arts and Culture.

She has an extensive regional and national exhibition record (see link below for exhibition schedule). Exhibits for 2006/07 include shows from New York to Wyoming.

In 2002 Jenny won a National Emerging Artist Award through the New York Independent Art Fair and the Art Collectors Club of Vienna. The award included her participation in an exhibit of contemporary US art in the Museums Quartier in Vienna during the first anniversary of 9/11. In 2003 she was awarded a Phillips Exeter Academy Faculty Grant to complete a project for the 2003 annual "In My Backyard" alternative art event in Maine.

Jenny was a finalist in the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation - Piscataqua Region's Artist Advancement Grant for two consecutive years--2004 and 2005, and was awarded the coveted $30,000 grant for 2006.

"My work concerns the changing perception of our bodies in an increasingly technological world. While my work attempts to express the complicated perceptions and unclear implications of biotechnology, the work does not intend to express fear of such change. Rather, the large format digital prints and installations suggest the sublime possibilities of the body merged with and manipulated by machine. Furthermore, the work insists on a continued state of embodiment and offers viewers/participants a new context in which to examine their own embodied possibilities."

Image: SheWorks, 2007, detail from 8' x 4' ceiling-hung double-sided screen, inkjet on matte vinyl.

For more information visit http://brjenny.home.comcast.net/

Back to 2005 Fellows page

Last updated: January 29, 2007