About

Lee Jensen is a Danish textile artist. Lee grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark, and now lives and works in Queens, New York. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Lee Jensen creates contemporary abstract quilts and hand-sewn stretched textile pieces. Her work is influenced by her urban environment and by her background working as a graphic designer for the textile industry in New York City. Her work is created from reclaimed and repurposed fabric remnants and each piece is created through a dialogue with the materials and is quilted entirely by hand. Lee's work evokes both time-honored craft traditions, as well as a contemporary graphic expression through her exploration of color and composition.

Lee Jensen is the recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts (Queens Art Fund) 2024 New Work Grant. In 2023-24 she was awarded participation in New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. Lee has exhibited in several gallery shows in NYC, and recent venues include New York Live Arts (New York, NY), El Barrio’s Art Space (New York, NY), Studio Artego (Queens, NY), and Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (Queens, NY). Her work was juried into QuiltCon 2024, hosted by The Modern Quilt Guild in Raleigh, NC. Lee’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic and Queens Chronicle. She is a member of the Textile Study Group of New York.

Statement

I am a textile artist and my quilts are portraits of my environment in abstract form. My work is rooted in my experience of place, seasonality, and memory. I grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark and I now live in New York City and my quilts express my experience of living in urban environments. As I move through my environment, I notice site-specific colors, shapes, textures, temperature, and seasonal signs. All this makes it into my work in abstract form. I use second-hand textiles and I consider each piece to be a conversation with my materials. Time is another important ingredient in my work as hand-quilting is a slow and meditative process. I construct textile maps of moments of feeling truly rooted in my environment. This allows me to feel more connected both to where I came from and to where I currently live.

In addition, I’m working on a new series of works that I call textile gemstones. These pieces are an exploration of how we choose to assign value to different materials and why. I’m recreating valuable museum-worthy gemstones (from the Museum of Natural History in NYC) using one of the world’s least valuable materials - fabric scraps. Through my work, I wish to elevate the hidden beauty in these discarded scraps. My wish is that we may see the potential in the resources we already have available to us, instead of endlessly producing new products and hurting the environment in the process.

Email: leejensenstudio@gmail.com