Discipline: Interdisciplinary Arts – multimedia installation

Jessica Fertonani Cooke

Discipline: Interdisciplinary Arts – multimedia installation
Region: São Sebastião, BRAZIL
MacDowell Fellowships: 2025

Jessica Fertonani Cooke is a Brazilian-U.S. interdisciplinary artist. She has researched the intersections between natural, political, and mythological borders around the U.S./Mexico wall in the Sonoran Desert, working closely with the Tohono O’odham indigenous community and the immigration rescue organization Salvavisión. This body of work was first exhibited in the Canteiro Gallery in São Paulo, Brazil, and later took form as a simultaneous exhibition project at BAC Gallery in Douglas, AZ, and Museo Arte Patrimonio in Agua Prieta, Mexico. It was granted the Puffin Foundation Prize and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts emergency grant.

During 2019-2022, she co-directed the collaborative project FIELD with Supermrin about control over nature through the medium of lawn grass. It was the winner of the Franklin Furnace Fund Performance Award and exhibited at Untitled Art Fair Miami, CityXVenice at Venice Architecture Biennale, and Pratt University.

Fertonani Cooke is currently developing a sound installation on the Saguaro cactus as a vibrational code of the Sonoran Desert's deep time and a film series in collaboration with Guta Galli on the cycles of violence and resilience within women's collective unconscious. She holds an M.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute and an Absolventin in Fine Arts from UdK, Berlin.

At MacDowell, Fertonani Cooke worked on the sound installation piece Saguaro, developed a series of drawings, and started an artist book on the project. It will show at a group show in Bisbee Arizona, in October 2025.

Portrait by Guta Galli

Studios

Adams

Jessica Fertonani Cooke worked in the Adams studio.

Given to the MacDowell Association by Margaret Adams of Chicago, the half-timbered, stuccoed Adams Studio was designed by MacDowell Fellow and architect F. Tolles Chamberlin ca. 1914. Chamberlin was primarily a painter, but also provided designs for the Lodge and an early renovation of the main hall. The studio’s structural integrity was restored during a thorough renovation in…

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