About JEN’S WORK

San Francisco and LA-based artist Jen Clarke is a painter and conceptual artist whose work excavates the masks we wear—literal and metaphorical—as sites of identity, performance, and power. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and social practice, Clarke creates bold experiences that challenge viewers to examine the structures that shape how we see ourselves and each other.

At the heart of Clarke's practice is a deep engagement with masking as both concealment and revelation. Her signature visual language—geometric masks rendered in vibrant color, glitter, and mixed media—draws from African diasporic traditions, contemporary identity politics, and the artist's own navigation of Black womanhood. These masks function as mirrors, asking: Who gets to be seen? Who decides what's important? What do we hide to survive, and what do we reveal to resist?

Through masks—Clarke makes visible the invisible labor of being seen. Her work asks: what becomes possible when we name the masks we wear, when we choose which ones to keep and which to lay down…our world becomes illuminated more fully.