Jen Bervin

Jen Bervin is an artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice delves into entangled relationships between text, textiles, and situated poetics to create complex, yet elegant work. Bervin’s solo and collaborative works often result from long-term research and collaboration with artists and specialists ranging from literary scholars to material scientists. Her conceptual, scientific, and literary investigations of material histories are attuned to the embodied, visual, and tactile aspects of language, and forms of inscription by non-human agencies. This work has been exhibited internationally at MOMENTA, Biennale de l’Image, Montreal; the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; The Power Plant, Toronto; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MASS MoCA; Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Des Moines Art Center; and Morgan Library and Museum, New York. Bervin has earned numerous awards, fellowships and grants including The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Short Term Research Fellowship at Yale University (2023–24), the Banff Centre Fleck Fellowship (2022), SETI Institute Artist in Residence (2016–2019), Foundation for Contemporary Art (2017), The Rauschenberg Residency (2016), Asian Cultural Council (2016), Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artist Program (2016), Bogliasco Foundation (2014), Creative Capital (2013), The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2012), New York Foundation for the Arts (2007), Camargo Foundation (2006), and MacDowell Colony (2006).

Bervin's books include Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems (New Directions/Christine Burgin with Marta Werner and Susan Howe); a Book of the Year selection by The New Yorker; Silk Poems (Nightboat Books), a New Museum Book of the Year and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Nets (UDP) and many others with Granary Books. A monograph publication Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works (1997–2020) is published in conjunction with the first survey exhibition of artist and poet Jen Bervin (b. 1972), organized by director and chief curator Kendra Paitz at University Galleries of Illinois State University, supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. ​Her work can be found in more than sixty international collections, including Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Yale University, Brooklyn Museum, and The J. Paul Getty Museum. Bervin's work has been covered in media outlets such as Artforum, Huffington Post, NPR, The Nation, LA Times, Frieze, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

Bervin lives and works in Connecticut with her wife, Charlotte Lagarde, and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2021.