Jenna Grotelueschen is an artist based in Greenville, SC with roots in California. In 2020, she completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her undergraduate education at Westmont College in California, earning a Bachelor's degree in Studio Art and minors in Art History and Global Studies. In 2015, she attended the Leo Marchutz School of Art in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Jenna is interested in conveying embodied experience, and not only her own. She understands imaging what others perceive as a way to build empathy. Her work has also focused on visualizing cognitive pathways.
In crafting representations of perception, she intends to bridge individual experience, sharing the wealth of sensations that is living. All the while, she is sensitive to the flipside: the opacity of our communal experience. She is mindful of the limits of language, of imagination, and of memory. This interrelation of minds and bodies within environments and in time anchors ranging inquiry. Past projects traverse writing, painting, printmaking, photography, and the digital landscape.
Her primary concern is working responsively and she will gladly situate herself within the camp of artists navigating the messy terrain of physical, chromatic, embodied, and handmade practices. The birth of her son in 2023 has given her a new lease on thinking about the interrelation of bodies, promting focus on material borders and overlaps.
Group exhibitions include Sight and Insight (2021) at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, Soledad (2020) with PRPGMX in Mexico City, the 2020 MFA graduate exhibition, The Future of Our Plans, hosted online by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Emerging Illinois Artists (2019) at McLean County Arts Center, and As of Yet, Unknown (2017) at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art. Her work is held in private art collections and at Westmont College. Jenna has taught in the Art Department of Westmont College. She is an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant recipient.