Jacquelyn Strycker
Jacquelyn Strycker is a Brooklyn/Queens-based artist working primarily in printmaking, collage, and fibers-based media. Her work explores the relationship between decoration and function, with a strong emphasis on material exploration and handicraft. Drawing inspiration from quiltmaking, geometric abstraction, and the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement, Strycker creates pieces that are an unrestrained layering of pattern on pattern. She employs mechanical processes like risograph printing to translate handmade techniques, making prints from her drawings that she then tiles, cuts up, reconfigures, collages, and sews into larger works. Her unabashedly maximalist, fluorescent pieces embody the pleasures of color, pattern, and craft.
Strycker holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art. She is currently a faculty member at Pratt Institute and the Director of Operations and Online Curriculum for the MFA Art Practice department at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has recently been exhibited at various venues including the Print Center New York; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Kunstraum Gallery, Brooklyn; Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center, Solomons, MD; Peep Space, Tarrytown, NY; Collar Works, Troy, NY; and Piano Craft Gallery, Boston. She has participated in residencies at the Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred; ArtPod Berlin; Gaia Studio; The Women’s Studio Workshop; and the Vermont Studio Center. Strycker is also a member of the inaugural cohort of the Print Center New York’s New Voices program and a 2023 Queens Art Fund grant recipient. Additionally, she is a daily artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design.
What initially sparked your interest in art?
I think, like most artists—or maybe really most people—I loved making art as a kid. Coloring, drawing, painting, and constructing costumes from paper and cardboard. Simple sewing projects with my grandmother. There isn’t one specific thing that sparked my interest. It’s more that I never lost interest and had both the naïveté and hubris to pursue art.
What connects your work together, and what keeps you creating?
I'm always working on multiple things simultaneously. Work generates new work. Creating patterns based on vintage textiles and quilts that I would print on paper eventually led me to want to use the same patterns on fabric. Piecing together and sewing the fabric works, and playing with the space of negative shapes, led to sewing and cut-outs in new paper works. Leftover materials from those are used to create different sorts of collages. The forms I find from making those then enter into new fabric works, and so on. I create to remember, to figure things out, and to connect with others. I create because I can't not create.
Describe your work using three words.
Patterned, neon, abstraction.
What are you most proud of as an artist, whether it's a specific moment or who you are as an artist?
I’m proud that I’ve stuck with it, that I’m still making art, and putting it out in the world. I’m 42, and it’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve found some (small amount of) success. Making art is amazing, but putting it out there means dealing with a lot of rejection, and that's hard.
If you could be in a two-person exhibition with any artist from history, who would it be and why?
Polly Apfelbaum. I love everything about her work—her use of color, the way she plays with material and a sense of high/low. Paint, fabric, ceramic, Sculpey. It’s rooted in process and formalism, but there are also pop culture and political references, a sense of humor, and joy. It’s what I strive for.
