Jessica Stockholder: Rose’s Inclination

In a site-specific Threshold series installation (large-scale installations of contemporary art), Jessica Stockholder intersects the Smart’s lobby with a wave of color and texture that climbs to the clerestory, cuts across the floor, and travels outwards into the Museum’s sculpture garden and beyond. 

Rose’s Inclination makes use of ordinary materials—lamps, paint, Plexiglas, carpet, and garden mulch—to “reach up and out,” altering the physical experience of the Smart Museum’s modernist architecture and landscaped courtyard. The work also repurposes a small section of the previous Threshold commission, a wall painting by Judy Ledgerwood, by agreement of both artists.

Stockholder is Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Art, The University of Chicago. Art21 deemed her “a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art.” Rose’s Inclination is her second public installation in Chicago since she arrived in 2011—the first being Color Jam (2012), which took over a busy intersection in the Loop and was one of the largest public art installations in the city’s history.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website