We Value You

2003 Gift Of Freedom Recipient

The Work of Jeannine Harkleroad

Art, Jeannine Harkleroad believes, is often more about sensing than about understanding. That’s why she fiddles with words when you ask her to explain her work. “Well,” she might say, “My art is like solving problems – some practical, some emotional, some psychological. It’s like this. It’s sculpture, but it has elements of performance. I like to think the object upstages the performance, in general, but maybe I’m skirting the issue. Or maybe…”

Finally, she gives up. “Each artist has a different logic,” she comments.

Harkleroad grew up in Chesapeake, Virginia, as the youngest of three children. Looking back, she sees the beginning of her artistic inclinations in high school, when she was chosen to attend a visual arts magnet school.

She later attended Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where she settled on sculpture as her discipline because it “seemed like that’s where you could really do what you wanted to do—it was kind-of the messiest department.”

Moving on, Harkleroad moved to the opposite coast to get her master’s of fine arts at University of California- Los Angeles. She also has been awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska.

The $50,000 Gift of Freedom award, Harkleroad says, will “mostly just allow me to do my work.”

Beyond making her own art, she also works for other artists in their studios. Under the tenure of the grant, she hopes to spend most of her time on her own work, and maybe take some time to teach. In addition to galleries, she also plans to work on finding non-traditional venues for her work, arenas that function like drive-in theaters or traveling carnivals. Harkleroad says she is interested in the way carnivals enter and exit a town and the way spectators move through them.

“How can art move publicly, so freely? I want to know,” she comments.

The Gift of Freedom will allow her more time in the studio, increasing and expanding her sculptures, she said.

The money will make it easier and faster, but I don’t want to think it would never have happened without the grant,” she said. “That’s a dangerous mindset.”