Leslie Wayne, One Big Love #73, oil on panel, 12” x 10”, 2012

Parsons faculty Jen Liu and alumna Leslie Wayne has been awarded a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship!

On April 6, 2017, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation approved the awarding of 173 Guggenheim Fellowships to a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the Foundation’s ninety-third competition. Edward Hirsch, president of the Foundation, is enthusiastic about the Fellows in the class of 2017: “It’s exciting to name 173 new Guggenheim Fellows. These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best. Each year since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue to do so with this wonderfully talented and diverse group. It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.” (from the Guggenheim PR release).

Jen Liu lives in Brooklyn. She studied at the California Institute of the Arts and at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. She makes drawings and paintings on paper, videos and installations that draw on diverse histories to construct fictions that say something about our contemporary society. In her large, seductive watercolors you can find imagery from art historical styles such as modernism and constructivism. Her practice also includes film, installations and performance.

Wayne is a painter and an occasional writer and curator. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery and lives and works in New York City. Her signature works are known for their highly dimensional surfaces of oil paint, forcing a re-examination of the term painting in the traditional sense. They often take the literal form of draped cloth, or like readymades, stand in for the objects they represent. In her new body of abstract work entitled Free Experience, Wayne reaches for, in her words, “that seductive dislocation” by exploring the range of possibilities for the representation of an illusion in as many different ways as possible, from tromp-l’oeil to verisimiltiude, while still remaining undeniably within the confines of a painting.

Join us in congratulating Jen and Leslie on this prestigious honor!