Jen Bervin

Jen Bervin is a visual artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together situated poetics and entangled relationships between text and textiles. Bervin’s conceptual, scientific, and literary investigations of material histories are attuned to the embodied, visual, and tactile aspects of language; these research-driven works frequently result from long-term collaborations with specialists ranging from literary scholars to material scientists.

This work has been exhibited internationally at MOMENTA, Biennale de l’Image, Montreal; the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; The Power Plant, Toronto; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MASS MoCA; Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Des Moines Art Center; and Morgan Library and Museum, New York, among others.

Bervin has earned numerous awards, fellowships and grants including The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Research Fellowship (2023–2024), the Banff Centre Fleck Fellowship (2022), SETI Institute Artist in Residence (2016–2019), Foundation for Contemporary Art (2017), The Rauschenberg Residency (2016), Asian Cultural Council (2016), Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artist Program (2016), Bogliasco Foundation (2014), Creative Capital (2013), The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2012), New York Foundation for the Arts (2007), Camargo Foundation (2006), and MacDowell Colony (2006).

A monograph publication Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works (1997–2020) is published in conjunction with the first survey exhibition of artist and poet Jen Bervin, organized by director and chief curator Kendra Paitz at University Galleries of Illinois State University, supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The monograph includes an interview with Bervin and the artist Charlotte Lagarde about their collaborative project, Su Hui's Picture of the Turning Sphere, with Jennifer Yee (Director of Public Programs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), essays by Jayme Collins and Kendra Paitz, and a newly commissioned twenty-page conversation with poet and playwright Claudia Rankine.

Bervin's books include Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems (New Directions/Christine Burgin with Marta Werner and Susan Howe); a Book of the Year selection by The New Yorker; Silk Poems (Nightboat Books), a New Museum Book of the Year and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Nets (UDP) and many others. She frequently collaborates with Granary Books to create artist’s books.

Her work can be found in more than sixty international collections, including Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Yale University; Brooklyn Museum, and The J. Paul Getty Museum. Bervin's multidisciplinary work is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and has been covered in media outlets such as Artforum, Huffington Post, NPR, The Nation, LA Times, Frieze, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.