JERILEA ZEMPEL

Jerilea Zempel is a visual artist and art activist who taught at Fordham University for over 25 years and has worn many hats during her long career. Originally trained as an art historian, she was a curator at M.I.T.’s Hayden Gallery, now the Vera List Center, where she organized a pioneering exhibition, Images of The Feminine in the Belle Epoque. Later, on the staff of the New York Cultural Center, she worked on the show and designed the catalog for Robert Smithson: Drawings. 

She has designed and built properties for Ping Chong,  Meridith Monk and Wendy Perron. She has won grants for her own work from The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation, the Middle Atlantic Arts Foundation, CEC Arts Link, and the Gunk Foundation. 

Jerilea has done public art projects in Battery Park, Kenmare Square, Snug Harbor, Prospect Park and City Hall Park in New York City; Art Park in Lewiston, NY; in Cazenovia, New York; Utica, New York; Fairmount Park in Philadelphia; the Atlanta Arts Festival; and in Antwerp, Belgium; New Castle, England; Canterbury, England; St Catherines, Ontario; and Poznan, Poland. She has had solo shows in New York City, upstate New York, Hartford Conn, St Lawrence University, Potsdam, New York and Burlington Vermont. 

A yarn-bomber before there was a word for it, her most recent pubic project, was a crocheted cover for an SUV, made for a Canadian Cultural Capital Festival in Sackville, New Brunswick, and it landed her on the Colbert Report in December, 2008. This car cozy has had an afterlife at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, on Earth Day, 2010 at the Blue Mountain Lake Museum in 2011 and in Athens, New York in 2012. 

In 2016 the Brattleboro Museum resurrected her shooting gallery of guns encased in materials like mirror shards, bubble gum and condoms for the show Up In Arms: Guns in America. 

Mucsarnok, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, Hungary, exhibited her latest installation: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, also in 2016