Jennifer Mack-Watkins

Jennifer Mack-Watkins is an American contemporary visual artist and illustrator whose practice brings together Japanese mokuhanga printmaking techniques with her culturally rich Southern roots, creating work that investigates societal conformities and the complexities of identity, beauty, and power. Her art is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Library of Congress, and the Getty Archives.

Mack-Watkins holds a BA in Studio Arts from Morris Brown College, an MAT from Tufts University, and an MFA in Printmaking from Pratt Institute. Her academic training across historically Black and elite art institutions has informed a practice that bridges multiple traditions and communities. In the summer of 2015, she was selected to participate in the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory artist-in-residence program in Yamanashi, Japan, deepening her engagement with traditional Japanese woodblock printing methods.

Her artistic practice investigates the societal conformities that isolate individuals, confining them to fit into prescribed spaces. This exploration encompasses the complexities of being a woman, beauty images, relationships, body image, power, and gender roles. Through mokuhanga, she translates these concerns into prints that combine the delicacy and luminosity of water-based woodblock printing with bold, confrontational imagery drawn from African American experience and the visual culture of the American South. Her work has been described as creating a future without limitations for children of the sun, speaking to an aspirational vision that transcends the constraints she documents.

Mack-Watkins was a Joan Mitchell Foundation 2015 Emerging Artist nominee and serves on the Board of Trustees at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and Essence. She has given artist talks and demonstrations at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, where she presented "Mokuhanga and Me," sharing her journey with the technique. She has exhibited at the International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara (2021), and her work "Future Undetermined" (2019), combining mokuhanga and screenprint, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.