Steffani Jemison

Jemison was born in Berkeley, California. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003).[1][4][5] She was a Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awardee (2013) and Art Matters Awardee (2014). She is an Assistant Professor in Media in the Department of Art and Design at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.[6] She previously taught at Parsons The New School for Design and the Art Institute of Chicago.[3][7]

As a child, she attended summer camp at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Her favorite class was one in which she was asked to write a story about one of the works in the collection.[8]

Major works include Prime (2016), Promise Machine (2015),[9][10] Projections (2014), Stroke (2013) You Completes Me (2013), Personal (2014), Escaped Lunatic (2010–11), Maniac Chase (2008-9), and Same Time.[11] Jemison's 2014 video Personal was included in the show "Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond" at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014. [12]

Promise Machine combined a reading group with performance. Participants formed a "Utopia Club," based on the Utopia Neighborhood Club, and including artists, activists, writers, and book club members. Jemison created a musical performance incorporating text generated in the reading group.[13] Jemison was partially inspired by the shared reading experiences that a church creates. Promise Machine attempts to create a similar experience in a secular space.[14] Prime references texts from key historical and cultural moments to explore the relationship between privacy and revolution.[15]

You Completes Me is a performance installation that a live reading of excerpts from urban fiction while the 1927 film The Scar of Shame plays, putting historical moments in conversation with contemporary ones.[4]

Jemison's films Manic Chase and Escaped Lunatic are both inspired by early twentieth-century films.[16] They focus on the actors' movements; she is particularly interested in the political implications of movement.[16]

Along with Heather Hart and Jina Valentine, she curated "The Intuitionists," a viewing program in which artists illustrated concepts from a paragraph in Colson Whitehead's novel, The Intuitionist. This installation was part of a viewing program at the Drawing Center.[17]

As an agent in the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Jemison collaborated with Liz Deschenes, Laura Wexler, and Dan Leers to create a platform demonstrating the relationship between photography and Pittsburgh. Their work emphasized the physical conditions that make photography possible.[8]

Jemison was awarded the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University in 2017.[18]

Jemison was awarded a Creative Capital grant in 2020 along with forty other artists.[19]
Jemison debut solo exhibition at the Kai Matsumiya gallery, NY, in 2019.[20]

Jemison's project Future Plan and Program commissions and publishes literary works by artists of color.[21] This continues her artistic interest in reading while aiming to make books that are available to a wide community.[22] It has published works by Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Harold Mendez, and Jina Valentine, among others.[1]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Steffani Jemison.

• Official website
• Promise Machine exhibition at MoMA