Associate Professor of Art (Drawing & Painting)

Year Joined RCNJ: 2009

Contact Information

• Phone: (201) 684-7518
• Email: jskrzyns@ramapo.edu
• Office: BC-325
• Office Hours: Mon 1:45-4:45 PM
• Personal Website

Education:

• B.A., University of North Carolina
• M.A., M.F.A., State University of New York

Courses Offered:

• Fundamentals of Drawing
• Basic Painting
• Life Drawing
• Intermediate Drawing
• Intermediate Painting
• Advanced Drawing
• Advanced Painting

Recent Scholarly and Professional Accomplishments:

• Four-time recipient of the Individual Artist’s Grant from Orange County Tourism
• Received an SOS grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA)
• Contributed a chapter entitled Finding the Balance, a Dialog between Three Artists with Mimi Smith and Diana Quinby, published in the anthology Reconciling Art and Mothering (2013).
• Ten of her drawings were published in the Summer/Fall2014 edition of Lunch Ticket
• Solo Exhibitions: 2009 Ten Years After Ten year retrospective at Ramapo College, 2009 Into the Wild at the Taylor Art Gallery at the University of Arkansas, Monticello.
• Group Exhibitions of note: 2009 Group Exhibition re:PLACE at Georgia College and State University.
• 2008 Paper in Particular at Columbia College, MO.
• 2006 Voice, chosen by Kara Walker, at the Providence Art Club/Hive Archive.
• Featured artist in 2 River View, an online journal of poetry art and theory, edition 10.2 and 12.3

Biography

Jackie Skrzynski (skrin-ski) earned her undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, including a pivotal year in Spain, and her MA and MFA from the University at Albany, NY. Her drawings have recently been exhibited at Theo Ganz Studio in Beacon, NY, Morehead State University in Kentucky, the Arc Gallery in San Francisco, Les Abattoirs d’Avallon in France and Tribes Gallery in New York City.

Beyond her studio practice, Skrzynski is interested in projects that bring art to the community in creative ways. She is the founder of PUG Projects, which creates temporary art exhibits in transitional, economically diverse spaces. She also created the yearlong outdoor collaborative piece Silent Walks on the Half Moon documented in a blog by the same name, which has been exhibited at the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz.

Skrzynski is inspired by what she perceives as an arbitrary boundary between humans and the natural world. Whether she is riffing on mythology and parenthood or hunters and their trophy animals, she makes work that is both beautiful and unsettling. Her drawings range in scale from a few inches to several feet, and engage the viewer with the physical properties of her mark-making.

Art Historian Carol Duncan wrote that Jackie’s imagery “avoids completely the cute, the cuddly, and the sentimental,…If she breaches the boundary between the human and the animal, she does so to challenge its veracity and retrieve something of value on the other side.”