Deborah Jack
Deborah Jack, is a St. Maarten and Jersey City based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting and text. Her work engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology and climate change. Her current practice connects the effects of the hurricane storm surge in relation to coastal erosion, the saltwater inundation of intertidal spaces She imagines these rhizomatic, protective intersectional landscapes and wetlands as sites of resistance. This altered landscape, post surge, though temporary, is an exciting conceptual space regarding the intangeble memory of water as it intersects with the land and the people who live there.
Her work was featured in the exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990’s-Today at the MCA Chicago and ICA Boston in Fall 2023. In Fall 2021 a retrospective, Deborah Jack: 20 Years was presented at Pen + Brush in New York City. She has exhibited at TENT Rotterdam, the Perez Art Museum of Miami in the 2019-2020 exhibition, The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, Portland Art Museum, and Delaware Art Museum. Her work is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, MCA Chicago and the Smith College Museum of Art. Deborah received a Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2021), Jersey City Individual Artist Grant (2022), a 2023 Changing Climate Resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute and was a Surfpoint Foundation Artist-in-Residence (2023). Deborah Jack received a 2024 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Deborah is currently a Professor of Art at New Jersey City University.
Deborah recently presented her new body of work in a solo exhibition entitled, Intertidal Imaginaries: The Resistant Geographies of the Shore in the Aftermath of Saltwater Surges, at the Houston Center for Photography. Concurrently, she is participating in Hurricane Season at the Des Moines Art Center. Her forthcoming exhibitions include Constellations: Racial Myths, Land, and Labour at the Esker Foundation and the Prospect 6 Triennial: the future is present, the harbinger is home.
