Whether using sculpture, video, performance, painting, photography or an amalgamation of each, at the center of Jamie Isenstein’s work is an examination of how we perceive our world and understand what it means to be human. On the surface, through her conflations and confusions of subject and object, fact and fiction, artifice and nature, life and death, her work appears humorous, uncanny and often on the verge of magic. Beneath the playfulness, though, lies a subtle but serious critique of the perceptions, circumstances, and structures that place limits on human dignity, autonomy, happiness and the possibility of connection.

Isenstein has shown her work nationally and internationally, including at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Tate Liverpool, UK, PS1, New York, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the Manchester International Festival, UK and Manif d’art The Quebec Biennale, Canada. Her work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum, the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, Reed College, Portland, OR, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA and the Tang Collection at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.

Her performative sculpture Still Life with Flowers, 2026, in the permanent collection of the University Art Museum at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM is available to be borrowed and inhabited by hired performers. Jamie Isenstein lives in Portland, Oregon.

A catalogue from her 2013 mid-career retrospective at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College, Portland, OR can be requested for free with the cost of postage ($5 for media mail as of 2026). A PDF of the catalogue for her 2017 exhibition Spectacle, at the art residency Gluck50 in Milan, Italy is also available by email.

Download a PDF of Jamie Isenstein’s CV here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G0ABBCGX4Xn728wB4Ve5KTUYYGjXxuzb/view?usp=sharing