Dallas Art Fair: Oliver Jeffers & Yu-Wen Wu

Oliver Jeffers is a visual artist and author working in painting, bookmaking, illustration, collage, performance and sculpture. Curiosity, perspective, the power of storytelling, and humor are underlying themes throughout Oliver’s practice. While investigating the ways the human mind understands its world, and place within that world, his work also functions as comic relief in the face of futility. 

Current directions for his art-making include the imaginary lines across land and imaginary lines in the sky. With the former, Jeffers–with a deep suspicion of Nationalism, Patriotism and Isolationism, born from growing up with the political and national uncertainty of a turbulent Belfast in the 1970s and 80s–picks apart the powerful story of human made borders, of how people treat other people. With the latter, Jeffers uses the construct of star constellations to take a longer lens approach to humanity’s story. With the egotism that was perhaps integral to the success of human civilization, Jeffers art looks at how we often forget our place in a grander cosmos- that the pictures we created for arrangements of stars in a night sky only make sense from this narrow perspective of Earth. But most importantly, given a seeming inability for people to comprehend the singularity of our Planet Earth, Jeffers tries to show, tell, and remind that this is the most urgent story humanity needs to rally around.

Yu-Wen Wu is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Boston. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Wu’s subjectivity as an immigrant is central to her artwork. Relocating to the United States at an early age, her experiences have shaped her work in areas of migration—examining issues of displacement, arrival, assimilation, and the shape of identity in a new country. At the crossroads of art, science, politics, and social issues, her wide range of projects include large-scale drawings, sculpture, site-specific video installations, community engaged practices, and public art.

Wu is the 2023 recipient of the James and Audrey Foster Prize of the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the 2021 recipient of the Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, and the recipient of the 2019 inaugural Prilla Smith Brackett Award. Her work is included in several public and private collections, including Harvard Art Museums, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Tufts University Art Galleries, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and the Weisman Art Museum.