Jessie Fisher

Jessie Fisher, Professor in Painting and Drawing at the Kansas City Art Institute, holds a B.F.A. from the University of Minnesota and an M.F.A. in painting, with a minor in printmaking, from the University of Iowa. She has studied at the Scoula Internationale della Grafica in Venice, Italy, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and apprenticed with Studio Balma, Minneapolis.

Fisher has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Weisman Museum of Art, the Des Moines Art Center, the American Museum of Art, the Guilin Museum of Art and the QinZhou NiXing Pottery Museum in China, the Palazzo dei Cartelloni and Maidoff Center for the Arts in Florence, Italy and the International Center for the Arts in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy.  She has also exhibited her work in group and solo exhibitions at the Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO, the UNO Galleries at the University of Omaha, Miami University in Oxford Ohio, the Marvin Cone Gallery at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA, Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, MO, Oulous Repair Shop in Los Angeles, Lo River Arts in Beacon, NY, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, SmartClothes Gallery in New York City and the McMaster Galleries at the University of South Carolina.

Fisher has been a visiting artist at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of South Carolina, St. Ambrose University and the International Center for the Arts in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy. Residencies include an AIA residency at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, the Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy, and the Visual Art and Design Academy in Santa Barbara, CA. She was a recipient of the 2008 Ohio Young Painters Prize from Miami University.

Recent curatorial projects include Dialoghi dell’Arte, an international tour of work by 16 artists, writers and educators who are influenced by the aesthetic history of central Italy, and Disegno: Contemporary Undergraduate Drawing exhibition series that has featured student work from the California College of the Arts, the Kansas City Art Institute, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Memphis College of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Princeton University, the Tyler School of Art and the University of South Carolina. Fisher is the program head for An Exquisite Corpse: KCAI at SACI, a collaborative summer program in the arts at the Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy.

Artist Statement

As an artist who is heavily influenced by the Florentine Renaissance, I am very interested in the influence that Antiquity had on the painters, sculptors, architects and scholars of the Cinquecento. The metrology of Polykleitos spoke to one of the most profound ideas in composition that has played a large role in my own studio practice as well as forming the basis of my pedagogical concerns.