Jennifer Blessing

Jennifer Blessing, Critic in Photography

Jennifer Blessing, Critic

Ms. Blessing received a B.A. from Brown University in 1984, and an M.A. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 1990. Her dissertation proposal was accepted in 1998. She is Senior Curator, Photography, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 2012, she organized Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Guggenheim’s presentation of SFMOMA’s exhibition Francesca Woodman. Other recent exhibitions include Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Catherine Opie: American Photographer. For the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, she curated True North and Jeff Wall: Exposure. During her tenure with the Guggenheim she has also curated touring exhibitions such as Family Pictures: Contemporary Photographs and Videos from the Collection of the Guggenheim Museum; Speaking with Hands: Photographs from The Buhl Collection; and Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. Ms. Blessing has contributed to numerous other museum exhibitions and catalogues, including Marina Abramovi ’s performance series Seven Easy Pieces; Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition; Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture & Design from France, 1958–1998; The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968; Art of This Century; and Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z. At present she is organizing the forthcoming New York presentation of Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, an exhibition originated by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, which is scheduled to appear at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2014, as well as a group exhibition tentatively titled Photo-Poetics: An Anthology. In addition to organizing photo- and media-based exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues for the Guggenheim and its affiliates, Ms. Blessing publishes and lectures widely on art and cultural practices involving photographic representation. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts and was appointed critic in photography at Yale in 2013.