A Conversation with Jenny Marketou:

Creative Skills for Community Development

"Marketou’s creations become catalysts for communities to confront social and ecological challenges and environmental impact."

Stemming from the Creative Skills for Community Development course in the Performing Arts Management and Entrepreneurship program, this series of three presentations curated by Juanli Carrion, is opening the conversation to the extended community at The New School about how different professionals working in the field of Creative Community Development approach their practices. Artists, curators, administrators, and stakeholders will present their work with communities to spark dialogues about processes, successes, challenges, failures, innovation and best practices.

 Join us for - 

A Conversation with Jenny Marketou:

Creative Skills for Community Development
Jenny Marketou is a New York based multi-disciplinary artist and art educator, who utilizes video, sound, new media, installation, photography, public performance and community organization to engage with socially charged content to generate and install models for social interaction and systems of knowledge. Marketou is particularly interested in emerging patterns and forms of civic engagement in an era of accelerated globalization, individualism and digitization. The ultimate aim of her quest is to establish ways of mobilizing and empowering citizens within the context of pressing global challenges.

About Jenny Marketou:

Jenny Marketou - born and raised in Athens, Greece - is based in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for her sprawling, often large scale floating public sculptures, transforming accumulations of discarded objects and live material into powerful ecosystems which she calls “Wet Gatherings.” Her work - which consists of installation, video, public art, and books - explores relational structures and the politics of collective intimacy and knowledge production. Distinguished by her labor-intensive and participatory process, Marketou’s creations become catalysts for communities to confront social and ecological challenges and environmental impact.

Her body of work includes several permanent public artworks commissioned by major agencies and municipalities, most recently a landmark commission, Futuring Waters: A Speculative Manifesto for and from the Rights of Water for  2023 Elefsina Cultural Capital of Europe, Rivering (2022) for New York Harbor, a collaboration with the Billion Oysters Project and Harbor School on Governors Island, and Serious Games ( 2021) for Kucuk Hasan Mosque commissioned by the Municipal Art Museum in Chania, Crete.

Her work has been widely exhibited and collected in major museums, cultural institutions, and biennials such as the Biennial de Mediterranean 19, San Marino; documenta 14 Athens/Basel: Manifesta, European Biennial;  Biennial of Seville, Spain; Biennial of Sao Paolo, Brazil; Biennial de Cartagena, Colombia; Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece and venues such as Vienna Art Week, The High Line, New York; Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid; ZKM, Center for Media Arts, Karlsruhe; Museum Tinguely, Basel; Kumu Art Museum, Estonia; Kunsthalle Basel; Queens Museum, New York; The New Museum, New York, among others.

Marketou’s work has been highlighted in Artforum, Art News, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Art e Critica, El Pais, Metropolis Magazine, New Yorker, and on Art21. She is  Adjunct Faculty at the New School for Social Research and she holds an MFA from Pratt Institute.