PICTORIAL FOUNDATION | JENA ARGENTA

JENA ARGENTA

Central Valley NY UNITED STATES

My practice engages global calligraphic traditions through literary, sculptural, and socio-sculptural methodologies, examining themes of legacy, illegibility, rupture, loss, and intimacy while foregrounding the material and physical dimensions of communication. I hold a BA in (Post) Colonial Studies from Sarah Lawrence College and undertook formal apprenticeship training in Arabic calligraphy in the Thuluth tradition with Elinor Aishah Holland in New York and Ahmet Bursali in Istanbul. I am also an inaugural artist-in-residence at Goshen Green Farm and a 2026 grantee of the New York State Council on the Arts.

I have a deep love for traditional practice — but I don’t consider myself a calligrapher: My service to the art is different. I’m in search of what Anaïs Nin calls counterpoisons.

In the Arabic script I studied, disciplined surrender replaces self-expression. This feels pronounced to me in a country hedged by isolation, nationalism and appropriation — one that takes individual freedom as anthem while simultaneously, as Audre Lorde reminds us, being on the wrong side of every liberation movement.

ARTWORKS

Grace (2023)

JENA ARGENTA

poem, prayer, translation, ink made from guns, chalk, metallic acrylic and gel, on paper.
32 1/4H x 24 1/8W in (81.9 × 61.3 cm) (framed)
$6500

“Another world is possible, but it is inside of this one.” — Paul Élaurd. I used ink made from recycled guns to remind me where I live. It offers counterintuitive terrain to consider anything like “grace.” This work resists viewing from a single physical vantage point, linguistic sensibility or sense of self. It suggests Édourd Glissant’s tourbillons de recontre,
“whirlwinds of encounter,” and the trembling mirror he describes as perhaps a vehicle for grace — one that requires archipelagic thinking “one that opens,” says Glissant “one that
is not made of unity but rather a new kind of relation. One that trembles — physically, geographically, mentally, spiritually.”

EXHIBITIONS

Code Girl

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JENA ARGENTA

Central Valley NY UNITED STATES

ARTWORKS

EXHIBITIONS