Jess Levine

About Jess Levine

There was never much doubt that Jessica Levine would end up an artist. “As far back as my memory goes, I’ve always loved making things with my hands and observing nature. I remember at age 8 pouring in wonder through a book titled ‘Looking at Modern Art’ and thinking ‘this is for me, I totally get this.'” Directly after college, Levine entered the very traditional Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where she “labored, painting and drawing, building representational chops,” although she always knew she would practice as a contemporary artist.

After art school, she had planned to work full time at the Janet Fleisher Gallery in Philadelphia, but West Virginia stole her heart and prompted a change of plans. “When my son was young, I started exploring beyond the traditional forms of my academic training. I needed to make art in ways that were safe around a baby and satisfying to work on 20 minutes at a time.” Being a new mother led her, as necessity does, to invention and she found herself branching out, working in an ever-widening swath of media, including “clay, rocks, branches, moss, all kinds of recycled materials, origami, collage, concrete, mosaic, ice, food, metal, jewelry, painting, drawing, photography, paper making, textiles, living and harvested plant material, paper mache, casting, weaving, books” and others beside. Levine now inhabits a niche of her own as a multidisciplinary environmental artist and focuses mainly on low-tech, interactive, community-based sculptural installations that fulfill her commitment to art that is aesthetically pleasing, while also environmentally educational.

Artist Statement

As an environmental installation artist with a socially engaged practice, Jess Levine works to connect people to nature and each other through participatory, immersive, interactive installations that embody the dynamics of growth, decay, and renewal of biodiverse systems. Inviting wide spectrum community engagement, the work encourages participation as it evidences process. Employing accurate regional science and indigenous wisdom, projects explore self-organizing systems, coordinated animal movements, including hiving, swarming, flocking, and schooling. Past projects range in scale from impromptu pop-up installations at farmers markets to interactive gallery installations accompanied by graphic publications to large-scale park areas.

Levine works with communities to create large-scale site-specific remedial environmental sculptural installations in public settings. The mixed media installations feature habitat restoration, are interactive and kinetic and include harvested and living plant materials. Based in accurate regional science, projects highlight biodiversity, multiple intelligences, indigenous practices, seasonality, and sustainability. As a collaborative research process with wide-spectrum participation, activities feature cooperative strategies, model democratic principles and embrace social bridging. The results of collective inquiry create community-relevant interactive sculptural installations and graphic artifacts that are conceived on a permanence/impermanence continuum based on individual project parameters; some installations are temporary &/or biodegradable. As groups study together a region’s natural history and deepen spiritual ownership in our communities, our place as stewards in a sustainable future is re-envisioned.