Bio

Jeanne Jaffe is a multi-disciplinary artist, a Professor Emeritus of Interdisciplinary Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and is a visiting artist at Xian Academy of Fine Arts in China.

Ms Jaffe is the recipient of fellowship grants for Outstanding Artistic Development from the Gottlieb Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mid Atlantic/NEA. the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Independence Foundation, the Leeway Foundation, Mino Artist Residency in Japan, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation. Works by Ms. Jaffe have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at such places as Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Hillwood Art Museum, Mino Washi Museum in Japan, Michener Art Museum, The Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh, Scotland, the Seokdang Museum of Art in Korea, , and the London Craft Council Gallery in England. She has recently moved to south Florida and has shown at Fat Village, Hollywood Art and Culture Center, IS Projects, Collective 62, the Amory Art Center and the Arts Warehouse.

Her work has been reviewed extensively, including in Art in America, The New York Times, and Sculpture Magazine.

Artist Statement

Inspired by an interest in anthropology, mythology, and psychology, my work explores how identity is forged from early, pre-verbal bodily experience through the later influences of language and culture. This is undertaken by investigating the use of metaphor and reexamining our cultural myths and stories.

In my sculpture involving pre-verbal experiences, I attempt to give concrete form to intangible sensations and early bodily experiences. This is accomplished by creating hybrid forms - fusions of animate and inanimate worlds, simultaneously familiar yet strange and uncanny

In installations such as” Little Red Riding Hood as a Crime Scene” or “Elegy for Nikola Tesla “and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets”, well known folktales, history, and poetry are reimagined through a contemporary lens and made into multi—sensory environments composed of sculpture, videos, interactive elements, stop motion animation and sound. al and external experiences.

How we navigate multi layered experience, where signification and understanding is being endlessly reshaped, and how we create meaning and self-determination from the cacophony of sensation, memory, myth, and cultural history is the subject of all my work.