Jennifer Mazza

Jen Mazza (born 1972, Washington D.C.) is a New York based artist who makes paintings and teaches at the Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design. Both her solo and her collaborative teaching integrate reading, artmaking and research across a range of disciplines, often focused on close visual analysis and problem-solving.

Mazza’s studio 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.

In addition to works in painting she has written a number of artist books and is also a contributor to the online arts journal The Finch. Mazza is represented by Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.

B.A., Mary Washington College; M.F.A., Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.