We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jennifer Wilkin Penick. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jennifer Penick below.

Alright, Jennifer Penick thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

This year (2023) I had the idea to organize a call for art on behalf of the hospital cancer center where I am a paid artist in residence. It seemed a good event to organize in conjunction with World Collage Day (May 13), and the way that we described the call explained that we were inviting artists to give small collage artwork (4×4″) that would be displayed before being given to patients, their families, caregivers, and hospital staff.

I was confident that we would get a good number of submissions and that the cancer center patients would love receiving pieces of original art. What both surprised me and buoyed my faith in humanity was the outpouring of submissions that we received from all over the world.I opened and logged in over 3,400 collages from 29 countries and 43 U.S. states. The most surprising aspect, though, was how delighted the artists were to contribute. We received dozens of notes of thanks for allowing them to produce art that had a meaningful purpose.

Jennifer Penick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am an artist who especially enjoys working in collage and mixed media, but I am more specifically a teaching artist. Although I devote time to my own practice, following up on whatever collage/painting/mixed media/printmaking idea that I have at the time, I thoroughly enjoy teaching year-round and my teaching informs my own work. I teach 5 or 6 classes per week–to kids and to adults, both in-person and on-line. I have always been a good communicator, and I have also always found great solace in making art. These two things help me to articulate the creative process to my students and also keep me focused on bringing the joy of art-making to others. I am interested in process over the final product in my own work, and I work continually to encourage my class participants to enjoy the creative process over fussing over a “perfect” final work. I enjoy myself (and encourage others) engaging in art-play–experimentation, open-ended projects, as well as collaboration, and the sharing of ideas. I try to practice what I preach, to remember that you may not always have a project or artwork clearly in mind, but you can always be a creative person.

In my classes we do the sorts of things that I most enjoy; we have fun making interesting hand-painted or embellished papers to use in our collages, incorporating printmaking, painting, and more. And then I encourage artists both to find their own artistic voice and to keep in mind some basic design principles that allow them to be more in control of their own compositions.

I am most proud of and delighted by the positive feedback that I get from my students, and by seeing the strong, interesting, and beautiful work that they produce. There is no better compliment than hearing that you have made others feel more confident, more creative, and more comfortable sharing their art with the world.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Although I studied studio art (and English literature) as an undergraduate and earned an MA in Art History, I worked as a university administrator based in Rome, Italy for 25 years. After much of my life lived abroad, I met my soulmate and eventually moved back to the U.S. (Washington, DC). I knew few people on the East Coast, and really wanted to at least take a break from administration. I started volunteering at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington helping to hang exhibitions. Initially it was a way to meet people and feel involved in my community. I began teaching, first classes for children and then for adults. That was over a decade ago and I never looked back. It was a great pivot–a real reinventing of myself–and it was wonderfully empowering to have a mid-life career change work so well!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Before the pandemic I taught in person. Always in person. And then with the pandemic, my work as artist-in-residence at Georgetown University Hospital could no longer be done in-person, and I moved to teaching on-line art classes. In these live online classes (two per week, each called “Creativity Jumpstart”) — I help others to use whatever art supplies they have to engage with weekly creative prompts. People join in from all over the world, establishing a proper community of kindred spirits and the size of the classes has grown from 20 to 200 participants per week.

Long story short: the regular contact with a large number of people helped grow my social media. It is now the main way that I communicate with my class participants, and they share images of work made in class, which of course helps my audience to keep growing.      

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jenniferwilkinpenick.com
• Instagram: @jenniferwilkinpenick
• Facebook: JenniferWilkinPenickArt
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeIILjD19Bmq4FoU17NVvKw

Image Credits
all photos were taken by me