Jesse Harrod, a visual artist who primarily creates sculptures, spent her time at MacDowell shooting a stop-motion animation and completing a series of large drawings for an upcoming show at Fleisher Ollman Gallery, in Philadelphia. Additionally, she made four large-scale sculptures for a show at The Leslie Lohman Museum in New York.
Harrod has an M.F.A. from the department of Fiber and Material Studies from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. She is currently the head of fibers and material studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Her solo exhibitions include Low Ropes Course at NurtureArt in Brooklyn, Toxic Shock and Hotdog at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and Soft Hardware at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, VA. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions throughout the United States, including In Practice: Material Deviance at the SculptureCenter in New York, the traveling exhibition Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community, and Towards Textiles, Material Fix at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI. In addition to her MacDowell residency, she has been awarded The Fire Island Artist's Residency, the Open Studio Residency at Haystack Mountain School of Craft, a residency at the Icelandic Textile Center, and one at the Vermont Studio Center, among others. Her work appears in two recently published edited collections: a book-length catalog to accompany the exhibition Queer Threads and an edited book published by Publication Studio Hudson that situates her artistic practice within a larger historical and contemporary context, with contributions from Jenni Sorkin, Daniel Orendorff, Allyson Mitchell, Laurel Sparx, Anthony Romero and JD Samson.
