Current Exhibitions
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Fort Worth, TX
July 13, 2024 - June 30, 2025
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art announces Jean Shin as the next contemporary artist to transform the Museum’s first-floor sloping gallery—the space linking the Carter’s original 1961 building and the 2001 expansion—with a site-specific commission on view from July 13, 2024, through June 2025. For her installation at the Carter, titled Jean Shin: The Museum Body, Shin seeks to create a textile-based “portrait” of the Museum’s staff, both those visible and invisible to the general public, who enable a museum to function. The installation will consist of donated garments representing the collective work of the people within the institution. Separating the fabric from its seams, Shin will shape these elements into a large-scale wall mural with immersive hanging elements that will activate the gallery walls and ceiling. The clothing will be collected from members of the Carter’s staff—including curators, conservators, educators, executive leadership, facilities staff, and more—and then deconstructed, re-assembled, and installed with a focus on adapting to the unique architecture of the space. The democratization of the collected garments invokes the breakdown of institutional hierarchies.
The Museum Body | Selected Press
Jean Shin talks about the inspiration behind
The Museum Body
at the Amon Carter Museum.
By Sarah Boxer
The Trustees, Appleton Farms
Hamilton & Ipswich, MA
April 22, 2024 - November 1, 2024
With Appleton Farms’ storied history and current ecological and agricultural activities, Jean Shin’s Perch will explore temporality (ecological and agricultural time) and regeneration. At Appleton, bobolinks—songbirds who make the long migratory journey from the southern hemisphere and whose populations are in decline—are the primary birds that use the grasslands and hayfields as their nesting site.
Marking sites where the Trustees’ ecology team monitors the bobolink population, Shin will create sculptural platforms made from fallen and dead trees found throughout Appleton that visitors can engage with, as they ultimately become participants in this critical monitoring throughout the project’s run. Within the nesting area, Shin will create sculptural perches made from fallen trees and salvaged copper in which male bobolinks can perch to search for mates and mark their territory.
Moreover, Jean Shin’s Perch will integrate into the landscape and support the agroecological work at the farm and is intended to visualize, amplify, and raise awareness around this critical species and its habitat as well as the important endeavors at Appleton Farms.
Perch | Selected Press
By Andrea Shea
By Louis Bury
The Trustees of Reservations Presents:
Perch
by Jean Shin
Past Exhibitions
Praise Shadows Art Gallery
Brookline, MA
June 16-July 23, 2023
Widely recognized for her large-scale installations and sculptures, Jean Shin's artistic practice is rooted in the rethinking of materials, specifically those that have been discarded at mass scale. As she told the New York Times in a 2009 interview, her criteria for materials is often something that is “cast off from a person’s life because its desirability and usefulness are questioned, that it in some way archives a personal history but also can speak to larger issues going on in our culture.” Second Skin is composed of materials used prominently in recent public art commissions, giving them another life in the realm of artistic expression. This exhibition demonstrates the possibilities of translating monumental public artworks into intimate indoor experiences by building on the materials' history and finding common ecological narratives in the new works.
Second Skin | Selected Press
By Yutong Shi
Curator Eva Respini &
Jean Shin talk about
solo exhibition, Second Skin.
at Praise Shadows Art Gallery
Laumeier Sculpture Park
St. Louis. MO
September 10 – December 11, 2022
Laumeier’s 2022 Visiting Artist in Residence
Site-responsive installation Home Base figures an alternate baseball diamond, one where a salvaged stump of a dead ash tree from Laumeier Sculpture Park is fashioned into the shape and size of a home plate. First, second, and third bases are reimagined as sculptural seats or benches created from the same ash tree and blemished bats donated by Rawlings, the sports manufacturer who supplies baseball bats to the St. Louis Cardinals. The artist endeavors to foreground the connection between nature and culture, specifically between a nationally treasured game and our beautiful forests.
Home Base | Selected Press
2022 Laumeier Visiting Artist In Residence, Jean Shin, talks about
"Home Base"
By Jess Wilcox
By Hovey Brock
Philadelphia Contemporary
Cherry Street Pier, Philadelphia, PA
June 17 - November 6, 2022
By making visible the mussels’ incredible capability to filter the river, Freshwater is a public fountain that elevates these endangered native species’ role in restoring the blue infrastructure from collapsing. Juxtaposed next to the polluted river water pumped from Philadelphia’s Cherry Street Pier and the vast amount of unused vintage pearl buttons produced as a consequence of overconsumption, the project is an urgent call to care for the freshwater mussels as vital to our healthy, living ecology and our drinking water.
Freshwater | Selected Press
