ArtistJerilea Zempel

Jerilea Zempel is a visual artist and art activist who has taught studio classes in visual thinking, drawing, color, sculpture and art and politics at Fordham since 1984. Originally trained as an art historian (Pennsylvania State University, B.A. & M.A.), she did curatorial work at the 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 designed the catalog for the show, Robert Smithson: Drawings. After receiving her MFA in sculpture from Columbia University she designed stage properties for Ping Chong and the Fuji Company and Meridith Monk/The House.
 
She has won grants for her own art practice from The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation, the Middle Atlantic Arts Foundation, CEC Arts Link, and the Gunk Foundation. She 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, Cazenovia, New York, Utica, New York, Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, the Atlanta Arts Festival, and i New Castle, England, Canterbury, England, St Catherines, Ontario, Canada, and Poznan, Poland. She has had solo shows in New York City, upstate New York, Hartford Conn, and Burlington Vermont. Her most recent pubic project, a crocheted cover for an SUV, made for a Canadian Cultural Capital Festival in Sackville, New Brunswick, 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 and will reappear at the train station in Saranac Lake, New York for a Hobo Festival on Labor Day, 2010. You can view more of her work and process on her website.