Anderson Ranch Arts Center Announces New Partnership with Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

 Organization receives substantial donation to launch a three-year initiative

Maggie Jensen, Photo by Max Braverman 

Aspen/Snowmass, CO (February 24, 2022) — Anderson Ranch Arts Center, a premiere destination for art-making and critical dialog in contemporary arts, announces a three-year partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the institution’s Glassell School of Art Core Residency Program. This initiative is generously supported by Anderson Ranch Chair of the Board of Trustees, Reggie Smith, and Ranch National Council Co-Chair, Leigh Smith.

Each year of the program, a Core Resident will participate in a Summer Workshop experience at Anderson Ranch, then return to the Ranch as a Visiting Artist for four weeks. The inaugural award recipient is artist Maggie Jensen, who will travel to the Ranch campus for a bronze and aluminum casting workshop Aug 22 - Sep 2, 2022, then return in November for her Visiting Artist engagement. As a Visiting Artist, Jensen will also liaise with the Ranch community through studio visits and critiques, as well as participate in a free public lecture about her work.

“We are so fortunate to receive this gift from Leigh and Reggie Smith, who are such critical supporters of Anderson Ranch Arts Center,” said Ranch President and CEO Peter Waanders. He continued, “This new program supports a deepened relationship between two leading arts organizations and their communities of artists and art enthusiasts. We can’t wait to welcome Core Resident Maggie Jensen to our extraordinary campus and see what she creates when steeped in our mission of enriching lives with art, inspiration and community.”

Says Reggie Smith about the initiative, “Leigh and I could not be more delighted to support this collaboration between Anderson Ranch Arts Center and the Core Residency Program of the Glassell School of Art in Houston. We have long been supporters of the Core Residency Program, which awards residencies to exceptional, highly motivated visual artists and critical writers who have completed their undergraduate or graduate training and are working to develop a sustainable practice. Providing an avenue for a Core Resident to further develop his or her artistic practice through a residency at the Ranch is a dream come true for us.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Maggie Jensen builds installations of sculpture, sound, text, and performance. Her work often closely resembles cultural artifacts that signify oppressive conditions of power. Within the predetermined spaces of European figural and modernist traditions, humanistic vocabularies, and privatized architectures, she uses poetics and abstraction to express mis-communication and doubt. Doubt used as subject matter is a tool to interrogate concepts of animation and figuration in landscapes of excavated violence.

Particularly interested in interior spaces of bodies, human and more-than-human, Jensen uses text and sound as an activating element for sculpture. Hums, growls, and electronic murmurs are tasked as material to hold a form between a state of composition and decomposition. She has spent the last several years in Houston, TX, where the environmental impact of sinking landscapes, and self-interested politics has influenced her work and research. 

Jensen holds a BFA in art history from Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and an MFA in visual art from the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of a 2019-2020 Humanities Teaching Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, and a 2020-2022 Fellowship and Artist-in-Resident of the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.