Biography

Born in 1981, in Lexington, Virginia, Jessie Mann became a familiar presence in contemporary art in the 1990s through the photographs taken of her and her two siblings by their mother, Sally Mann. Commenting on Jessie's more recent modeling for the photographer Len Prince, the New Yorker said it is "as if one of Velázquez's infantas had grown up and sat for Rembrandt". The project with Prince is a collaborative exploration of the social and cognitive dimensions of artistic practice, identity and canon-building?themes which Jessie also tackles in her writing (recently, an essay in the journal Aperture) and painting. This work debuted in September at Danziger Projects in NY and traveled to the Adamson Gallery in Washington, D.C. The work was featured in the Washington Post. The show traveled to Chicago where it was displayed by the Catherine Edelman Gallery. Accompanying the exhibition, Jessie gave a lecture and slide show at the Chicago Institute of Art. The work was most recently seen at the Faye Gold Gallery in Atlanta.
Having studied locally, as she was growing up in Lexington (with the encouragement of family friends Cy Twombly and Sam Messer, each in his different way a profoundly challenging and renewing force in American art), Jessie returned full-time to painting after concentrating on the sciences at George School (Newtown, Pennsylvania) and obtaining a degree in psychology from Washington and Lee University. Her academic studies in perception, memory, and the establishment of subjectivity feed into her paintings, described by the Roanoke Times as resembling "abstract landscapes”. They are produced using oils, latex, enamels, and ink on canvas; Masonite is also frequently used as a ground in the artist's pursuit of more varied textural effects. Jessie's works have been shown in group shows at the XYZ Gallery in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Zone Chelsea in New York City. She has had solo shows at Nelson Fine Arts in Lexington, Studio Swan in Georgia and at the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond Virginia. Most recently she has shown at the Longview Gallery in Washington, DC where she now lives.