Other artists commit to tradition, including Jennifer May Reiland, who draws with a vengeance. Her exquisite bird’s-eye-view tableau “Encierros” depicts the dense activity radiating from a bloody bullfight.
Her paintings engage playfully and profoundly with questions of faith, with eros and the human body, with the myths and legends of Texas colonial history.
About
Jennifer May Reiland is based in New York. She graduated from Cooper Union in 2011. She has received the Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship in Paris (2012-2013), was granted a studio through the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in New York (2014-15), and was selected as an artist for Jeune Création 2016. She was a resident artist of Open Sessions at the Drawing Center in Soho from 2015-2017 and at Queens Museum from 2018-2020. She has shown her work internationally, including at the Drawing Center, the Fondation des États-Unis, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin. She has had solo shows at Galeria Enrique Guerrero (Mexico City) and at Lawndale Art Center (Houston). She loves medieval art, alligators, and reading about history.
You can read Jennifer May Reiland’s artist statement here.
Her pictures of women are not so much documentary portraits as gestures of a sort of imaginative empathy, where historical facts and artistic interpretations collide.
Her art, which mixes heavy religious motifs with a sweet, homemade, sketchbook quality, is not the work of a true believer, but neither can it be described as skeptical or materialist. Her imagination is locked on overdrive, with a tone suspended somewhere between desire and doubt, myth and history, truth and reconciliation.
Contact
To get in touch with me, fill out this form or email me at studio@jennifermayreiland.com. If e-mailing, please include in subject ‘Brand Collaboration’, ‘Original Work Purchase’, or other.