About

Jen P. Harris (they/she) was born in Virginia and currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Harris received a BA in studio art from Yale University in 1999 and an MFA in painting from Queens College of the City University of New York in 2008. They were awarded a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2012, a Pollock Krasner Grant in 2025, and an Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship in 2026. Harris' works are in numerous public and private collections and are featured in the book TEXTILES x ART: How Textiles Are Shaping Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2025). Recent exhibitions include Patricia Sweetow Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Jane Lombard Gallery (New York, NY), Essex Flowers (New York, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), and Abattoir Gallery (Cleveland, OH).

About the work
My loom-paintings are both painting and weaving, and they resist fitting neatly into either category. Each piece begins as a traditional painting might, with a stretched canvas and layers of paint, which I transform into a simple loom by hammering nails across the top and bottom, installing a warp vertically across the painted surface, and weaving horizontally with hand and needle. The hybrid nature of each loom-painting emphasizes the slippage between painted and woven elements, forming a dialectical space in which the two meet to conjure shifting bodily and spatial subjects. Some works, like Night Swimming (2026), articulate this transformative exchange through tension: woven shapes tug on vertical warps to reveal slices of the painted field below. Optical vibration also plays a role, playing with our perception to propose a fluid field of vision and meaning. The work engages with traditional textile practices, historical painting languages, and the graphic language of comics, bringing an intuitive approach to image-making into conversation with a technical approach to tapestry weaving, a visceral understanding of color, and a cartoon-like use of line. In holding these various modalities in tension, the loom-paintings collapse clear distinctions and binaries, privileging ambiguity as both a visual and philosophical condition.