Jen de los Reyes

Jen de los Reyes is an artist, educator, writer, and community arts organizer. With roots in the Riot Grrrl and DIY music scene, her practice incorporates pedagogical, ecological, and organizational methodologies. She founded and directed Open Engagement, an international conference on socially engaged art that was active from 2007–2019. She worked within Portland State University from 2008 to 2014 to establish the Art and Social Practice MFA program with a curriculum focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. Following that, Reyes was the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies. 

Her collaborative work and practice have been situated at institutions including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Queens Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, MCA Chicago, and the Portland Museum of Art.

She speaks widely and has presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, UCSB, UMass, NYU, Textile Museum of Canada, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Concordia University, Carnegie Mellon University, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Milwaukee Art Museum, UC Berkeley, Alfred University, The Power Plant, and Project Row Houses amongst many others.

She is the author of several books, most recently Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire. She divides her time between Chicago, where she founded Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, NY.

Academic Research/Specialty Areas

  • Collaborative practice
  • Interdisciplinary art
  • Socially engaged art

Related Links

Related News

Classes (Selected)

  • ART 2103 First-Year Studio Research Workshop

Exhibitions and Presentations (Selected)

  • The Future of Work, group exhibition, Art Gallery of Burlington, Ontario (2022)
  • Emergent Futures: State of the Field, three days of exchanges and social research in North Carolina's Triangle & Triad (2019)
  • Art Lessons: What I Never Thought I'd Learn About Life From Contemporary Art, solo exhibition, Adobe Books, San Francisco (2017)

Publications (Selected)

  • de los Reyes, Jen. Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire, Collected Writings 2007-2022, Trumpeter Press, 2022.
  • de los Reyes, Jen. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Public Engagement But Were Afraid to Ask. Chicago, Something Other Press, 2020.
  • de los Reyes, Jen. I'm Going to Live the Life I Sing About in my Song: How Artists Make and Live Lives of Meaning, OE in Print, 2016.

Selected Work

  • Nine different image squares with different photos of people talking combined with the letters OE and OPEN.

    Open Engagement Conference (2007–2019). image / provided

  • Illustration of a woman with long braided hair holding a farm tool in one hand and two small dogs in the other, surrounded by a small garden, three chickens, and two goats.

    Garbage Hill Farm is a small-scale, backyard, artist-run urban farm on a post-industrial corridor serving Chicago's McKinley Park neighborhood. The project models what is possible on a residential lot in an urban center. illustration / Allison Fries

  • Blue , yellow, and white parakeet perched on the back of a hand.

    Portrait of Ocean (2020), part of Artists in Presidents. photo / Megan Codilan

  • Building with red covered windows and two black and white signs hanging on both ends.

    Invitation (2020) National Public Housing Museum. image / provided

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