As an interdisciplinary artist, my work is rooted in a feminist framework and aims to combine disparate media, subject matter and tone as a tool for research and the production of knowledge. Reflection on class conditions is fundamental to my practice and happens in myriad ways, predominantly through investigations into 19th–20th century socialist and labour organizing, and use of media that has middle or working class connotations, such as craft traditions like latch-hook rugs, shag carpeting and popular media like comic books. Central to my work is the cartoon, which I define as a distillation of life into an eminently readable, iconographic form, and an ongoing investigation into the liberatory potential of humour as a tool for critical reflection. As with my projects that use research into the past and material culture, I see these tools as lenses through which to view contemporary problems and possible ways of addressing them.
BIO:
Jessica Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist who has had solo exhibitions at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and her work has been included in group shows at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin; the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario; the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta; and the ICA in Baltimore, MD. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Houston Art Museum, and the Royal Bank of Canada.
She is the author of three graphic novels, including Rave (Drawn and Quarterly, 2022), and her comics were included in the 2025 book Drawn to MoMA, a book of comics about art published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has been artist in residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA); Facebook (Fremont, CA); the University of South Dakota State (Brookings, SD); the Icelandic Textile Center, (Blönduós, Iceland); SPACES (Cleveland, OH); John Michael Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan, WI); and Ox Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI). She is an Assistant Professor of Expanded Drawing at York University in Toronto.
Represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.
jessica.m.campbell@gmail.com
Image: Anadolia (18/25), 2024 Screenprint on Arches 88 14 x 11 inches. Process/Process, Chicago.