Printing with Janine Polak
Janine Polak comes to print with us in the intaglio workshop, together with your fabric pieces, or clothes that you do not use after. We will create several community print pieces where we are doing monotypes using our personal items we bring made of fabric.
If you want to take part, only bring clothes without buttons or zippers please. The prints created, will be exhibited during Rundgang 2026.
Janine Polak works across mediums (sculpture, printmaking, drawing, etc.) with materials that, much like our own bodies and psyches, contain concurrent strength and vulnerability. Glass stretched thin after melting in the kiln, slip-dipped high-fired porcelain, eyelashes squeezed tightly between wood, and the fortitude/futility of a wall or fence have all been explored in recent years. She utilizes old socks, tank tops in need of mending, or bits of fabric that are destined for the rag pile and preserves them into frozen gestures. For the viewer, the resulting objects call to mind cleaning, folding laundry, picking up socks off the floor, or tying a toddler’s shoelaces. This is the kind of essential work often done by women and marginalized communities, work that is often overlooked, yet crucial to our existence and function of society.
Janine Polak is an American artist based in New York City. She received a BA in Studio Art (Sculpture and Photography) and Economics from the University of Virginia in 2005 and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art, Department of Sculpture in 2008.
She has had solo exhibitions at Essex Flowers, NYC; Vassar College, NY; Lorimoto, Queens; Ernestine, NY; and Sardine, Brooklyn, and group exhibitions including at Brennan & Griffin, NYC; Equity Gallery, NYC; TSA NYC; Sculpture Space, NYC; and international exhibitions in Iceland, China, and Australia. She teaches at Purchase College, SUNY in the School of Art+Design and is the Chair of the interdisciplinary Foundations program.