WORKROOM 2024 Resident Artist Spotlight: Jessica Mueller

Since 2004 Jessica Mueller has been a teaching artist with Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), working in Chicago Public Schools. Jessica holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and is a member of the Chicago ACT Collective and MotherArt: Revisited. She exhibits locally and nationally, and her work is part of the permanent collections at the School of the Art Institute’s Flaxman Library, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, and the Library of Congress. Jessica is a recipient of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) 2019 Heart of Gold Award and is a 3Arts 2021 Make A Wave grantee and Sante Fe, New Mexico based the dots between fellow. Recently, she was an artist in residence at WORKROOM and PO Box Collective in Chicago, Nido II; Living in the Play, Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy and Poor Farm Little Wolf, WI.

“My work provides visibility for experiences of motherhood that are less than glamorous, shows the absurdity and value in the domestic mundane within actions of care and service, and offers a space for collective thinking. I investigate intersectionality as I experience it while tending to my bii-cultural/dual-language/single-parent household, negotiating the world of academia and everything else. I am an interdisciplinary artist with my work taking form through a variety of materials including embroidery, video, printmaking, performance, and sculpture. “

During WORKROOM Jessica is continuing to develop her project MotherWords and the project Power of Words and Perseverance, which emerged out of her participation in CAPE’s Artist/Researcher Partners program. Jessica and her teaching partner Tracy Netter at New Sullivan Elementary School plan to continue planning their working together for next year. At the same time, Jessica will review her “past arts integration projects, take time to write, reflect and process, as well as consider what I may return to in my practice and in the classroom.” 

In addition, Jessica and her new teaching partner in the Collaboration Laboratory (CoLab) program, art teacher Fay Jenson, who is also a WORKROOM resident artist this year, plan on experimenting together as artists “and see what that leads to for our work together in the 2024-25 school year.”