Jenny Kendler makes the invisible visible through her elaborate initiatives that bring to light the climate crisis we are facing. As a long-time advocate, Jenny Kendler has persisted in standing up for her beliefs and is deeply passionate about using her work to communicate her message to people from all walks of life. Her unique artistic approach explores beyond the established and continues to demonstrate the purest form of beauty. Her optimism and influence extend beyond her work, as she works with organizations to support local artists and advocate for change.

Where are you based?
I live and work in Chicago, with my four and a half year old daughter, Kestrel, where my home and studio are in a 1910 gray stone I’ve been restoring bit-by-bit since 2020.

What inspired you to get into art?
It never occurred to me, really, to do anything else. It’s not really that I wanted to be an artist, I just was one.

What is your secret to coming up with ideas for your artwork?
I definitely have a research driven practice, so I am always reading non-fiction books and articles, listening to podcasts, exploring and being constantly put into a state of wonder by the diversity of the natural world. When something catches my interest, I write it down in my sketchbook, something I have always kept. Often my finished ideas that become projects can be quite complex, and can even take years to mature. I allow the ideas to simmer until an internal-logic is reached — which encompasses everything from materiality to narrative — and every part has been considered. Insights come in moments of quiet, generally. Fragments coalesce to form new methods of approach.

You work with so many different mediums. How would you describe your artistic style?
I’m a very conceptually driven artist, so you’re correct — I don’t work in one medium. In fact, I am often driven to find mediums that have rarely, if ever been explored — such as one current project where I am growing sculptures inside of pearl oysters or a prior one where I made my own proto-amber. But there are stylistic elements in common between my projects which often use the same ‘strategies’ that give rise to beauty in the natural world: intricacy, delicacy, ephemerality, repetition and pattern etc. I definitely don’t shy away from beauty, because for me this is such a part of the pleasure of art-making and art-viewing and can be a doorway for viewers. I don’t think there should be a hierarchy in terms of who feels invited in to an artwork. My work is not just for ‘art world people.’ And I definitely don’t believe that art needs to look “ugly” to be thought of as intellectually-engaged.

Your artwork, Whale Bells, in Berlin is a beautiful exhibition. Can you tell us a little bit about the story behind this piece? What was your intent when creating the exhibition? What message did you want your audience to receive?
The Whale Bells are a collaborative project with another artist — my dear friend Andrew Bearnot. I had the whale ear bone fossils which make the bells’ clappers in my studio for many years. They were such evocative objects but I wasn’t sure what to make with them. Andrew is a glass-blower, among other talents and we came together to this project with the idea of sort of releasing the sound that might have been stored—in a poetic-sense—inside of these bones, which once perceived sound and now create it.

You currently have The Mending Wall up at the Chicago's museum campus. Can you tell us a bit about the significance of this wall and what you hope others get from it?
Mending Wall is a bit of an idiosyncratic project for me, but one that felt like it needed to be manifested in the world. We are living in a time of intersectional crises: climate change, the ongoing struggle for racial justice, the pandemic and more. It felt like Chicago needed a space to be able to mark and memorialize. So people are invited to write private messages and insert them into the cracks in the wall — but these take on a public and archival capacity by eventually being accessioned into the adjacent Field Museum’s collections, to become a potent record of this moment hundreds of years hence.

You are also currently in a group show at The Chicago Cli-Fi Library. Can you tell us a bit about this show?
The Chicago Cli-Fi Library is a group show which proposes that responses to the enormity of the climate crisis may need to be hyper local. It features the work of five Chicago artists and contains my project Underground Library — a biocharred archive of books on climate change — alongside my collaborative work Whale Bells.

We love how so much of your art touches on social issues, especially environmental awareness. Why is this important to you?
As a secular Jew, I often touch on the concept of Tikkun Olam, or the practice of ‘healing the world.’ I believe that for each of us, we should find, within our own communities and skill sets, those areas of the world which need to be healed. No matter how small, this is the most worthy work that our lives can be set to, to reknit connections to care, to bend towards justice, to remake and restore.

Since 2014, you have been the first Artist-in-Residence with Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Can you tell us a bit about NRDC and your work with them?
NRDC is an amazing organization, one of the largest and most-effective environmental organizations in the world, and certainly in the US. They use advocacy and legal strategies to protect the natural world and serve an important role in also creating policy. Elizabeth Corr, their Director of Arts Partnerships, took a real risk in starting their Artist-in-Residence project in 2014, when it was not very common for non-arts organizations or NGOs to host artists. Today, you see this becoming more common, and together we have produced quite a few large scale projects, including the Milkweed Dispersal Balloons project and Birds Watching at Storm King. Currently, we’re working together on a public art commission for Governors Island, which will open in late spring 2024.

You are a founder of Artists Commit. Can you tell us about Artists Commit and what inspired you to start it?
Artists Commit is an effort to raise climate consciousness within the art world. While we do this in many ways, as a group of artist-activists we focus on a tool we created called the Climate Impact Report, which is a simple and flexible way for arts organizations to track the carbon, waste stream and human impact of their exhibitions. We believe that once people see these numbers, they can’t unsee them, and we have seen great evidence that doing a report leads to real change within these galleries and museums. Tate Modern and Hauser & Wirth have adopted and run with the idea. We know art organizations have the responsibility to bear vanguard, so we’re aiming to show them that there’s no way to remain relevant without thinking about the climate.

You also co-found OtherPeoplesPixels; can you explain why you founded this platform and who can qualify for these grants?
OtherPeoplesPixels is my company, which allows artists to create and maintain their own portfolio websites. You can think of it a bit like Squarespace, but just for artists and actually founded and run by artists, instead of venture capitalists! We’ve been doing this since 2005 and it continues to really important to us to help artists share their work and give back to the creative community.

What advice would you give artists looking to raise social awareness?
Art can be a powerful and important part of how we create culture. The forces of climate change, capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy may seem too big to combat as an individual, but as Ursula Le Guin has said, anything that has been created by human beings can be changed by them. These are ultimately cultural forces, and so it is up to us as artists to be a part of the movements working to change them. Art can make the invisible visible, make the diffuse tangible and can show people visions of how the world might be otherwise. Another world is possible. Art can be part of bringing this into reality.

Do you have any exciting new projects you would like to share?
I’m currently working on a few large scale projects. Most excitingly and soonest, I’ll have work in a show called Dear Earth which opens at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London on June 21st. In addition to an interactive sound piece, I’m creating a 40 foot sculpture which highlights birds who are threatened by climate change and will overlook that Waterloo Bridge.

What are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of not compromising my ethics and standing by my fierce love of the natural world as an artist, even when I was told for many years that this was not a serious or intellectual “subject matter.” As climate finally, and so very late, captures the imagination of the art world and beyond, I’m proud to have stayed true for decades to what I knew in my heart to be the most important issue of this era.

It has been a crazy past few years, how have you been staying positive?
Plants. I have over 100 house plants, from huge ferns to orchids, and caring for them in a reciprocal relationship where they clean my air and beautify my home is a form of meditation.

What is your motto in life?
Live in reciprocity. It is the truest expression of what it is to be a living being on this wondrous planet.

To learn more about Jenny Kendler, please follow the links below:
Jenny Kendler
Artists Commit

Jenny Kendler- Giving Rise To Beauty In The Natural World