Jennifer Bartlett is an American painter and sculptor. She grew up at Long Beach and studied at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she met Elizabeth Murray, a celebrated American painter, printmaker and draughtsman, who became a lifelong friend and influence. After receiving her bachelor degree from Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1965, she moved to New York, where she was a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts from 1972 to 1977. Today, she lives and works in New York.
Upon exhibiting her infamous art installation entitled Rhapsody in the 1970s, Jennifer Bartlett became a big sensation in the art world. This was a monumental, foldable painting made of numerous enamel tiles, incorporating many elements that she continued to explore in her work for years to come (i.e. nature, geometry). Rhapsody, now widely considered one of the most ambitious works of contemporary American art, was purchased the week after opening for $45,000 – an extraordinary amount of money at the time – and in 2006 it was donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it has been twice exhibited in the atrium, with great success. In 2004 Bartlett began to incorporate words into her paintings and in recent years she has also experimented with abstract painting.
Her works are exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as well as other art galleries across the US.
