About

Jenny Schmid grew up in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she runs bikini press international and is a professor at the University of Minnesota Department of Art.  She first learned intaglio printmaking at age 16 through a Smithsonian workshop and worked as an assistant in fine art lithography workshops in Seattle and San Francisco, starting at age 18. She has spent significant time in the Czech Republic, and Slovakia on a Fulbright Fellowship, learning traditional print processes. Schmid has collaborated with poets, musicians, programmers, librarians and a bioethicist to realize projects that range from print folios to large scale live animation projection commissions. Her work is influenced by and incorporates work from the print archives she frequents, and she looks across history to make sense of and respond to current social, political and environmental issues, most recently reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

She is a 2019 recipient of the McKnight Fellowship at Highpoint Center for Printmaking. Her 2020 linocut folio, “Pandemic/Pandemonium” featured by The Print Center in Philadelphia and Davidson Galleries, Seattle was purchased by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, University of Minnesota Library Special Collections and Seattle University.

Her animation "Microworlds” (music by Andy McCormick) exhibited in 2020, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin. Her print “Owlettes” was featured in the 2023 “Director’s Cut” by Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, UK and her work was shown in the three-person exhibition “Wandering Light” at Fukui City Gallery, Japan.  She taught a 2023 intaglio intensive at Penland School for Crafts, NC, and enjoyed a July residency at In Cahoots in Petaluma, CA, creating monoprints in collaboration with poet Elisabeth Workman.

She is a 2024 recipient of a University of Minnesota Science Artist in Residence research award for “Disembodied/Reembodied: The Gaze and Dysphoria of Medical Images of Women’s Bodies'' in collaboration with the Wangensteen Historical Library, merging past and present images, resulting in a folio and exhibition in October 2024. The resulting folio has been purchased by the Library of Congress, The Minnesota Historical Society and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, among others.