Jess: To and From the Printed Page concentrates on how Jess's visual works connect to the literary culture in which he thrived--personally, intellectually, and aesthetically—and uses that focus to frame his work. Ultimately this exhibition enables the viewer to better understand and appreciate this "outsider" artist who, despite his widespread following of passionate devotees, is an unfamiliar name within the larger contemporary art community today.

Printed matter served as subject, object, and fodder for Jess. As he once said, "I have always delighted in [the] relationship between words and images [and] thought of the book as a form of collage space." A contemporary of fellow California collagists Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, and George Herms, with whom he is sometimes compared, Jess collaborated intensely with poets and other writers, and worked with small presses and limited-edition publications throughout his life. These collaborations were as much social as cultural interactions—a way of corresponding with friends and participating in their art.

Jess's literary heroes, evoked directly or referenced throughout his work, included James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein, and his life partner Robert Duncan, the respected American poet. Joyce's penchant for punning and verbal slippage, Carroll's Victorian explorations of alternate realities, and Stein's use of words as found objects and broken rules of syntax all find a place in Jess's visual sensibility, as does the erudite, mythology-laden poetry of Duncan. Jess's relationships to authors and artists—both predecessors and those in his midst—were densely intertwined. So intimately tied to the printed word is Jess's work that it is almost impossible to consider his art without it.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Jess developed his artistic style, giving his works titles full of literary references that span the ages—from ancient and classical times to the contemporary moment in which he lived. While often described as an artist who worked outside the contemporary art mainstream for most of his career, Jess did receive some critical attention during his lifetime, starting in the early 1960s, for a body of work he began making in the 1950s: his elaborate collages. Collage, especially those in which there is the integration of text and image, was a process that first interested Jess as a child, and one with which he worked throughout his artistic career. Composed of old book illustrations and photographs from magazines, Jess's collages, which he called "Paste-Ups," draw from nineteenth century illustrations and engravings and recall the Surrealist collage methods of Max Ernst, another artistic hero for Jess.

Jess: To and From the Printed Page is particularly timely. Jess's art, especially his more intimate works on paper, his literary relationships, his collage-based practice, as well as his involvement with books and printed matter-overall, his densely layered, rich and what might even be called obsessive aesthetic-all strike resonant contemporary chords. Our world is more than ever one in which a never-ending stream of images and text cascade in and out of our consciousness. The computer enables us to download or cut-and-paste, to collage information instantly into personally meaningful forms. Moreover, computer technology has enabled independent self-publishing to become ever more prevalent in today's media culture empowering a "do it yourself" quality that contemporary audiences recognize in Jess's work. "Zines," "blogs," and personal Web sites might be seen as today's equivalent of Jess's small press productions. This capacity for each individual to invent their own mode of expression using both word and image, whether through printed materials or through the Internet, is a central and timely tenet of the exhibition.

JESS is organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and is Curated by Ingrid Schaffner

Project Funders

Jess: To and From the Printed Page is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI, (Independent Curators International), New York. Guest curator for the exhibition is Ingrid Schaffner. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the iCI Exhibition Partners.

About the Curator

Ingrid Schaffner is the senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, where she has organized exhibitions of the work of Polly Apfelbaum, Karen Kilimnik, Barry Le Va, Sarah McEneaney, Pepón Osorio, and Richard Tuttle, along with the group exhibitions The Big Nothing and The Photogenic: Photography through its Metaphors. She has also curated Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More... On Collecting, organized by iCI (2001-02); Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (AXA Gallery, 1998); and Deep Storage: Storage, Archiving and Collecting (Haus der Kunst, 1998); among others. She has written extensively on contemporary art for Artforum , Parkett , Grand Street , Frieze, and other publications.

About iCI

Founded in 1975, iCI is a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through traveling exhibitions and other activities that reach a diverse national and international audience. Collaborating with a wide range of eminent curators, iCI develops innovative traveling exhibitions, accompanied by catalogues and other educational materials, to introduce and document challenging new work in all mediums by younger as well as more established artists from the United States and abroad.