On view January 18 – February 28, 2019
Garment Girl developed from Jennifer Vanderpool’s immigrant grandmother’s reminiscences about working as a cook in a sweatshop in the Allegheny Mountains and her mother’s stories about sewing shirt collars in order to pay her college tuition. The exhibition interlaces her matrilineal family stories of struggle with current labor activism through evoking questions about the global textile industry and the unseen garment workers sewing in sweatshops. Garment Girl includes imaginary realism prints, textiles, and workers’ stories told by Vietnamese refugees who worked in Los Angeles sweatshops, and those told by women textile laborers in Hà Nội. Their stories are interwoven with interviews Vanderpool conducted with labor scholars and activists in both locations. Garment Girl first opened in May 2018 at Heritage Space, Hà Nội, Việt Nam.
A native of the Mahoning Valley in Northeast Ohio, Jennifer Vanderpool, Ph.D. is a Los Angeles-based new genre artist who works across mediums to reveal relationships between physical landscapes and the unseen forces that shape them, knitting together narratives about forgotten institutions, people, and communities. Some recent exhibitions include Super Natural, at the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow and at Nepravilnyi Prikus, Simferopol; Flores Para El Trueque with Mercadito & Mentidero, Bogotá, Colombia, and with No Lugar – Arte Contemporáneo and La Huerta y La Maquina, Quito, Ecuador; and at Edward Cella Art+Architecture, Los Angeles.
Vanderpool has spoken about her practice at UCSB, UCLA, Otis College of Art and Design, Universiteit van Amsterdam, OVERGADEN: Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, and Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá. Her work has been awarded funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Ohio Arts Council, Kunstrådet: Danish Arts Council, Kulturrådet: Swedish Arts Council, and Malmö Stad. Vanderpool and the UCSB Isla Vista Liaison were awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America grant for her community arts work in Isla Vista, California. She is currently an adjunct lecturer in the Art Department at Cal Lutheran.
Image: Jennifer Vanderpool, Panel 3, 60 x 36 inches, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
