Künstler_innengespräche mit Janine Polak und Cynthia Lin

Janine Polak und Cynthia Lin sind Erasmus Visiting Professors vom Suny Purchase College, State University of New York USA.

Janine Polak is an American artist based in New York City. She received a BA in Studio Art (Sculpture and Photography) and Economics from the University of Virginia in 2005 and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art, Department of Sculpture in 2008.

She has had solo exhibitions at Essex Flowers, NYC; Vassar College, NY; Lorimoto, Queens; Ernestine, NY; and Sardine, Brooklyn, and group exhibitions including at Brennan & Griffin, NYC; Equity Gallery, NYC; TSA NYC; Sculpture Space, NYC; and international exhibitions in Iceland, China, and Australia. She teaches at Purchase College, SUNY in the School of Art+Design and is the Chair of the interdisciplinary Foundations program.

She works across mediums (sculpture, printmaking, drawing, etc.) with materials that, much like our own bodies and psyches, contain concurrent strength and vulnerability. Glass stretched thin after melting in the kiln, slip-dipped high-fired porcelain, eyelashes squeezed tightly between wood, and the fortitude/futility of a wall or fence have all been explored in recent years. She utilizes old socks, tank tops in need of mending, or bits of fabric that are destined for the rag pile and preserves them into frozen gestures. For the viewer, the resulting objects call to mind cleaning, folding laundry, picking up socks off the floor, or tying a toddler’s shoelaces. This is the kind of essential work often done by women and marginalized communities, work that is often overlooked, yet crucial to our existence and function of society.

Cynthia Lin was born in Taiwan and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work develops from slow, attentive looking that eventually leads to strange connections. She traces this back to her first memory: balancing on a hot radiator in Montreal, peering through a fogged window to puzzle at distant figures in a mysterious world below. The vulnerable body, the desire to see despite disruptions, the confusing experience of the dislocated outsider, the enigma that stirs imagination —this was her beginning. Today, she has arrived at a hybrid vision of a precarious but adaptable world.

Lin is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and recognition as a Finalist from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Satchel Projects, DeCordova Museum, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Yossi Milo Gallery, The National Academy of Design, Drawing Center, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Michael Steinberg Gallery, and Pierogi Gallery. Collections include Minneapolis Institute of Art and Dallas Museum of Art. She has attended residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, Dora Maar House, the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program at the American Academy in Rome, and Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus II in Schwandorf, Germany, among others.

She earned her BA from University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from The University of Iowa. Lin currently teaches at Purchase College, State University of New York, as Associate Professor of Painting + Drawing.