AT&T presents Makers in Their Spaces is an online offering in which MMA’s virtual participants are invited into the creative space—physical, mental, social, or otherwise—of a maker, thereby giving them unique insight into how that particular artist draws inspiration from their surroundings during this time. In this installment, we are eager to present Jennifer Torres, a sculptor, installation artist, and USM tenured art professor working in Hattiesburg, MS. She is no stranger to the Mississippi Museum of Art: her work has been featured in past Mississippi Invitationals and Garden Boats (2011) is currently on display in The Art Garden. Her most recent solo exhibition, Misfit Children: Landscapes and Creatures from the Mind of Jennifer Torres, was exhibited in the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art earlier this year. Concerned with social and environmental issues, she says she aims to “discover the place of the weirdo/outcast/anomaly in all of this and how the idea of contrast is actually a unifying paradigm in life as well as art.”
Saturday, October 10, 10 AM – Pre-recorded video of tour of Torres’s space posted on MMA’s Instagram and Facebook pages
Monday, October 12, 6 PM – Instagram Live Q&A with Torres
About the Artist:
Jennifer Torres was born in Queens, NY and spent her childhood in Teaneck, NJ. She did her first four years of studio training as a teenager at the Art Students League in New York City and then earned her BFA at the Cooper Union, also in NYC. Her focus was steel fabrication, casting, woodworking and photography. After graduating from Cooper she trained as a fine cabinet maker in New England, learning important skills that she still utilizes today. After traveling around the United States for a few years including working at a lumber mill in Oregon she moved back east to get her MFA in Sculpture at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Ms. Torres has lived in Hattiesburg, MS for 21 years where she has her studio and teaches sculpture as a tenured professor at The University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, MS. She has had many exhibits of her sculptures and installations around the country and has won a number of awards and commissions. Ms. Torres received a highly competitive 2020 MS Visual Arts Fellowship and was chosen as Creative Researcher of the Year at USM’s College of Arts and Sciences. Currently she is working on a big commission of new Garden Boats similar to those currently in Art Garden at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.
