Jen P. Harris / Jen P. Harris

Jen P. Harris repositions the relationship between painting and weaving. Their paintings pose an intersection of ambiguity, where neither painting nor weaving resolves without the slippage between both. Suspending expectations, Harris obscures their paintings by animating the painting as a loom, stretching a warp of yarn from the top profile of the painting to the bottom of the stretcher, whereupon they needle weave the weft in response to the newly camouflaged composition. Harris’ unique approach electrifies the dance between media, each transgressing the space and story held by the other. Their paintings become a queer metaphor where concrete morphs and dissolves into a river of nonlinear multiplicity.

“This departure from the material hierarchy of paint over canvas, this repositioning of cloth, conventionally rendered invisible and inert by paint, as an agent with a presence all its own, is quite possibly the thing I was searching for all those years. It lets me stir things up. Working with the thread has become the method by which I can make visible that which I sense in the painting but cannot reach with paint alone.”

Jen P. Harris, (b. 1977) received a BA in Studio Art from Yale University, and an MFA in Painting from Queens College CUNY. She was awarded a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2012, a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2025, and a 2026 Albee Fellow from the Edward Albee Foundation AIR at The Barn. Her works are in numerous public and private collections and are featured in the upcoming book TEXTILES x ART, published by Thames and Hudson, 2025. Recent exhibitions include Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, NY, Essex Flowers, New York, NY and Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland.