Artist Mark Jenkins Discusses His Packing Tape Sculptures at

Press Room

Artist Mark Jenkins Discusses His Packing Tape Sculptures at Reynolda House Museum of American Art

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Sharyn Turner
336.758.5580
sturner@reynoldahouse.org
or Sarah R. Smith
336.758.5524
manselss@reynoldahouse.org

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (September 8, 2009) Reynolda House Museum of American Art will present a talk by contemporary artist Mark Jenkins on Tuesday, September 22, at 5:30 p.m. Jenkins is participating in the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's yearlong public art series, "Inside Out: Artists in the Community II."

Jenkins uses packing tape to create figures for outdoor sculptures, one of which will be on view on the grounds of Reynolda House. Other sculptures will be seen in and around Winston-Salem.

Admission to the lecture is free. For information, please call 336.758.5150 or visit reynoldahouse.org. Scotch Packaging Tape from 3M is sponsor of the event.

Whether he uses dry casts of his own body to create "public figures" or casts made from dolls to create tape babies, it is both the art and the response it provokes that interest Jenkins. His first street series of "Tape Men" appeared in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, and subsequent installations of parking meter lollipops and merry-go-round horses in an urban traffic circle have appeared in Washington, D.C. His Embed series installs clothed, life-size tape casts in unusual urban settings—stuck in trash bags, mounted on traffic cones, and even a figure that appears to have its head stuck into a wall. Curiosity, amusement, and sometimes distaste are some of the responses to his art, which is designed to provoke a discussion of public art and urban art in particular.

Reynolda House Museum of American Art is one of the nation's premier American art museums, with masterpieces by Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe and Gilbert Stuart among its permanent collection. Affiliated with Wake Forest University, Reynolda House features traveling and original exhibitions, concerts, lectures, classes, film screenings and other events. The museum is located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the historic 1917 estate of Katharine Smith Reynolds and her husband, Richard Joshua Reynolds, founder of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Reynolda House and adjacent Reynolda Gardens and Reynolda Village feature a spectacular public garden, dining, shopping and walking trails. For more information, please visit reynoldahouse.org or call 336.758.5150.

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