ARTIST STATEMENT
Jane Gilmor’s art is concerned with social issues, found situations, and psychological
narrative.
Her work is an amalgam of intuitive responses to personal experience and
cultural critiques
of contemporary society. Her latest installations, extending from
her Containers for the Self series,
present wearable structures activated with
robotics as well as room-sized walk-in books covered
with etched metal found notes
and embedded with video. Her search is for those entanglements
of image, language and space through which we try to locate our own identity.
"Pillows" 6' x 5' x 3' aluminum, ink, feather pillow 2005-2013
BIO
Jane Gilmor attended The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and has an MFA and
MA from the University of Iowa in Iowa City. She has exhibited nationally and
internationally for the past 35 years. In 2011 she was one of five artists selected
nationally to receive a Tanne Foundation Award for her work as an artist.
In addition, she has received an NEA Visual Artist's Fellowship, a McKnight
Interdisciplinary Fellowship, and residency fellowships in Ireland, Italy, London, and at
The McDowell Colony. In 2003-04 she was a Fulbright Scholar in Portugal. Her most
recent solo exhibitions were Blind at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, The Architecture of
Migration: I’ll be back for the cat, at Long Island University in Brooklyn, 2009, and in
2010-11 she completed a year-long community-based project and major installation,
Un(Seen) Work, at Grinnell College for the exhibition Culturing Community. In 2008 she
co-curated Where are You From? Contemporary Portuguese Art, with Lesley Wright,
Director of the Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College.
Jane Gilmor: I’ll be back for the cat, a career monograph written by art historian and
critic Joy Sperling was published by A.I.R. Gallery in New York in 2012. Gilmor’s work has been reviewed in journals such as The New York Times, The Chicago
Tribune, and The New Art Examiner and is included in several books including Lucy
Lippard’s, OVERLAY: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory; and Broude and
Gerrard’s The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970’s History and
Impact, Abrams, 1993; and Pioneer Feminists: Women Who Changed America, 1963-
1976, B. Love, University of Illinois Press, 2006. In 2009 she was a contributor to
Cabinet magazine.