Jacqueline Humphries

The Crown Point Press Viewing Room is an online presentation of prints by a single artist or a group of artists. It may feature a newly released publication or a selection of rare prints from our early history. Jacqueline Humphries is the subject of our third Viewing Room. We present ten prints made in the Crown Point studio in 2016 by the New York-based artist.

Jacqueline Humphries is an abstract painter who connects her work to the cultural and social dialogue of today. Born in 1960 to a family of artists in New Orleans, she has lived and worked in New York since the 1980s. She attended the Parsons School of Design, New York, in 1985, and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, in 1986. Through layering, scraping and blending, Humphries focuses on motion and light to create visual energy.

The ten etchings Humphries created at Crown Point were her first works in this medium, and they build on her developed vocabulary of emojis, which she began using in her paintings in 2014. Working with custom-made stencils that she brought with her from her studio in New York, Humphries incorporated grids of dots and emojis over loose brushstrokes that fill the image areas of the prints with vibrant color, kinetic energy, optical illusion and structural patterns.

“I am less interested in harnessing technology as a means to make paintings, or changing painting through technology,” Humphries has said. “But in how technology has changed me. How computers have changed bodies, and so, by reimaging painting as a technology interface, I think of painting as a screen upon which anything can be projected.”

Jacqueline Humphries’ work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tate Modern, London. She is represented by Greene Naftali, New York.