Bio

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FEED THE MODELS

Jane Gennaro is an artist, writer and actor who grew up in Rockville Centre, New York, studied at the State University of New York at Fredonia and Cortland, and went on to make a name for herself in New York City, where she started out as an illustrator for books and magazines.  Beginning in the 1980s she began performing in cabarets and working steadily as a radio and television actor and voice-over artist.


Gennaro established herself as a playwright with two well received productions that debuted at the American Place Theater; The Boob Story, followed by Reality Ranch.  These were satirical critiques of celebrity, the media and the objectification of women’s bodies in contemporary culture.  This feminist perspective would appear throughout Gennaro’s visual art.  Other solo works include Heebie Jeebies produced by The Cultural Project,

and Shaking the Goose Egg developed at The Ensemble Studio Theater and The Workshop Theater Company.


In the late 1980’s, Gennaro began the introspective visual journals that she continues to create two decades later.  A seminal event turned Gennaro to the visual fine art work that has engaged her ever since. In a rural setting upstate New York, she was thrust into a disturbing incident with wild geese that was the source of both a solo performance piece, Shaking the Goose Egg, and the series Eggs and Bones, an ongoing meditation in sculptures and reliefs on nature, mortality, and the possibility of rebirth.


Hair or ‘Trichotillomaniart’ © is a series in which the artist uses her own hair to form the basic linear pattern of drawings that have a surreal, dream-like quality, suggesting that the body and identity are mutable elements

in a larger network of relationships.


Models, is a series of cut-outs from magazine ads which create fantastic beings from imagery that seeks to commodify the female body.  Feed the Models!, the solo exhibit of this work, which includes life size prints

and sculptures, takes it’s title from one of several commentaries Gennaro has written and performed on

NPR’s All Things Considered.


‘Kinderdraussen’ is a series of collaged assemblages in which Gennaro’s interest in the remains of life and the preserving of memory, is here expressed through vintage imagery and the skulls and skeletons of small animals.  Like much of her work, this series explores the confrontation of innocence and death.


Gennaro’s work has appeared in a number of solo exhibitions including The Fashion Institute of Technology, the Adele and Herbert J Klapper Gallery at Adelphi University, The World Monuments Fund Gallery and Rogue Space, all in New York. Group exhibitions include Clark Priftis Gallery in Baltimore, a number at New York Law School for the Organization of Independent Artists, as well as Time & Space Ltd., the Columbia County Council of the Arts, and Museum of Imagination, all in Hudson NY.