Jenna Manzano is a multidisciplinary artist creating sculpture, assemblage, and drawings. Her primary body of work utilizes woven and wrapped fiber as a sculptural material, composing form through weight, draping, and hand sewing in the natural greyish-beige tone and slubby texture of raw linen. Monochromatic texture and repetition, both in the process of making and in the visual result, unify her work across disciplines.

Using simple and familiar materials, she pulls inspiration from the postminimalist sculptural object. She looks to Eva Hesse, Franz Erhard Walther, Robert Morris, and the early work of Richard Serra for models of the human touch within an otherwise non-figurative format. The postminimal shift to organic shapes and pliable mediums reacted to the clean and manufactured lines of minimalism. Likewise, Jenna returns to the slowly made and imperfect three-dimensional object in rejection of the nonstop noise of our flat and oversaturated digital lives.

The labor-intensive process of hand-making invites silence and introspection in both process and result. The non-figurative forms rely on scale, repetition, and monochromatic composition to invite a deeper form of attention and stillness, connecting the viewer to their internal, emotional temporal space rather than setting forth a direct statement of meaning or message. Jenna’s larger sculptural works maintain a vaguely human proportion and scale, confronting the viewer with inevitable similarities between the work and the viewer themselves in the amount of physical space they inhabit.

Jenna holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of California Berkeley and a Master of Fine Arts from Mills College in Oakland. After graduating from Mills, she continued volunteering in the Book Art studio, teaching workshops in both letterpress printing and book binding techniques before spending a decade freelancing in graphic design. Jenna brings this uniquely blended background—the metaphorical, conceptual process of experimental poetics coupled with a distinct attention to the streamlined formal composition of design—to her current art practice. She is based in Oakland, California.

jenna@jennamanzano.com