J Jan Groeneboer
Brooklyn, New York
J Jan Groeneboer received the Creative Capital Award in 2024. J Jan Groeneboer is a conceptual interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. Groeneboer’s work has shown at David Zwirner Gallery (2018), Boston University Galleries (2017), Poprally at MoMA (2016), Art in General (2016), the Queens Museum (2016), CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art (2016), MoMA PS1 (2015), Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2015), among others. His most recent solo exhibition Selected Views was at The Kitchen (2024). Essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art 21.com, Mute Magazine, Artforum.com, Temporary Art Review, Art Journal, and in Pink Labour on Golden Streets “Appearing Differently: Abstraction’s Transgender and Queer Capacities.” His writing has been published in Texte Zur Kunst (2023) and Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2023). He received a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and an MFA from NYU.
The Sound We Make Together
J Jan Groeneboer is an interdisciplinary transgender artist, writer, and educator typically working in abstraction to address the politics of representation.
Artist BioThe Sound We Make Together (working title) is a multichannel sound installation based on recordings of participant’s responses to prompts and questions (as well as archival selections) about gender that centers transgender and non-binary experience. This project will also address the current wave of anti-trans political violence in the United States. Materially, Groeneboer will use sound wave patterns, interference phenomena, and vocal superposition to structure the composition, as well as sculptural interventions in the architecture of the exhibition space to extend these acoustic effects. The Sound We Make Together is the second iteration in a body of work on sound and gender that began with Double Mouth Feedback (2015). Groeneboer will begin with the development of the prompts and questions followed by recording source material from members of his trans, queer, and feminist communities, and through institutional support to work directly with the public for greater inclusivity of voices and perspectives. This source material will be composed into the sound piece that weaves together and imagines inclusive gender systems. Formally, Groeneboer wants the structure of institutions to be implicated in the structures that inform gender constructions. Audience-based participatory performances will be presented in conjunction with the installed sound piece. When Groeneboer presented Double Mouth Feedback at MoMA PS , a large audience responded to the prompts together. These performance-based moments with the public felt powerful to Groeneboer. He will develop this aspect further in this project.