Judy Jensen
Judy Jensen (born 1953) is an American artist who resides in Austin, Texas. She is best known for her reverse painting on glass, although she incorporates other mixed media into her glass pieces. According to Nancy Bless, Jensen's works "lie somewhere between a collage and a collection." Biography. Jensen was born in Lamesa, Texas. When Jensen first became interested in glass, she began to create stained glass panels. She eventually recognized that painting would be less restrictive. She credits her undergraduate study in cultural and physical anthropology at the University of Texas (1971–1974) for many of the  themes and recurring symbols in her work. Her early work features skeletons and fire, while snakes become important in later work. Jensen has said of her work, "My paintings are mystical – not very many things are." Jensen is involved in a project replacing glass paintings, destroyed in an earthquake, in a 19th-century Buddhist temple in northwestern Thailand. These will depict the Vessantara and Siddhartha incarnations of Buddha. She was awarded a grant from the James H.W. Thompson Foundation in Bangkok in support of the project. Career. From 1980 to 1985, Jensen was involved with the Renaissance Glass Company in  Austin, Texas, a studio for flat glass artists founded by Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend and Rodney Smith. There she experimented with a variety of painting techniques, including reverse glass painting. Jensen has exhibited widely. Solo venues include eight exhibits with New York's Heller Gallery; the Galveston Arts Center; and the Houston Center for Contemporary Crafts. Group exhibitions include "Glass Today: American Studio Glass from Cleveland Collections", Cleveland Museum of Art, 1997; "Pilchuck Exhibition," Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, 1996–1997; Gerald Peters Gallery in New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Atlanta's High Museum; "Tell Me a Story: Narrative Art in  Clay and Glass", Eighth Triennale India, New Delhi, 1993; "International Exposition of Sculpture Objects, and Functional Art: SOFA", Chicago, IL, 1996; "Selections from The Chodorkoff Collection", The Detroit Institute of Arts, MI, 1991; and "World Glass Now", The Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan, 1994. A National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship recipient (1986), Jensen's works are in numerous public and private collections, including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Corning Museum of Glass, McDonald's Corporate Art Collection, and the Washington Art Consortium. For  eight years, Judy Jensen worked almost exclusively on commissions.