Artwork Description
Jeanette Pasin Sloan – Black Shift
Dimensions: 24 x 24″
Year: 2024
Medium: oil on panel
Born in Chicago in 1946, Sloan became a mother in the 1970s. Feeling the claustrophobia of young motherhood, stuck in her small apartment, she began to paint all of the objects in her kitchen from cereal boxes to the highchairs to find a creative and intellectual outlet. Starting at seven at night after her children went to bed, she spent years sleeping only three hours a night honing her craft through how-to books. As her painting progressed she began to look for ways to challenge herself, and her interest in reflective surfaces began with the old, chrome toaster on her kitchen counter. From this grew a passion and fascination with reflection, texture, pattern, and distortion that has sustained her practice ever since.
Sloan’s work can now be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Elvehjem Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Kansas City Art Institute School of Design, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, National Museum of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington, DC, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the New York Public Library, the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame, and the Yale University Art Gallery to name a few.
Like many women artists of her generation, Sloan persevered for decades, painting every day without the same opportunities to exhibit her work that her male peers received. This allowed her the solitude to refine her skills, and emerge in the present day as one of the most talented painters of our time. She has pioneered a genre of painting she calls “reflective realism,” indicating both the literal and metaphorical blending of realism with meditative reflection.