Jen Blazina Works

Biography

Jen Blazina resides and has a studio in Philadelphia where she is a working artist exhibiting with solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Blazina has been awarded numerous residencies including: the Corning Artist in Residency at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York; GAPP Residency at Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, OH; The Estonia Academy of Art in Tallinn, Estonia; Bezalel Art and Design Academy in Jerusalem, Israel; European Ceramic Work Centre in Tilburg, Netherlands; Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, CA; Frans Masserel Centre in Kasterlee, Belgium; Creative Glass Center of America in Millville, NJ. Among her awarded grants are Bessie and Louis Stein Fellowship; Leeway Foundation Grant; Independence Foundation Grant; a NEA grant supported by the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. Her work is in numerous museum and private collections as well as represented by in art galleries across the country.

Jen Blazina received her M.F.A. in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art, her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and her B.F.A., cum laude, from the State University of New York at Purchase College. She is a Professor of Fine Arts at Drexel University.

Artist Statement

My role as an artist is to be a record keeper of lost memories and forgotten voices. Memory is embodied in everything around us; in our culture, beliefs, our objects and ourselves. Discarded objects, as well as ones passed down to me by my family, become personal keepsakes and icons of the past. To other people these mementos would otherwise be overlooked or regarded as something useless, but to me, my collections represent a sense of holding onto a place in time and capturing memory. Creating these visual narratives in all of my works, I express concepts of memory, document personal histories, and record voices which would otherwise be lost— universal concepts to which an audience can relate.