Jennifer Levine lives where she works, in a loft at Queen City Lofts in downtown Poughkeepsie, a creative refuge for artists: part sanctuary, part community, part factory of dreams. “It’s a beautiful building. I’m so grateful to be there,” Levine says, having arrived in the Hudson Valley during the pandemic and embedded herself in its scrappy art world ever since.
Next weekend, during Upstate Art Weekend’s Open Studios Tour, Levine unveils “Experiment Wildly,” her latest and most personal body of work, in her home studio. The paintings—spare, searching, and boldly colored—plunge into questions of identity, vulnerability, and liberation. “This new body of work asks the essential question: What can you hold on to?” she says.
Levine’s paintings center on the female figure—sometimes solitary, sometimes embraced—rendered in distilled, emotive lines and fields of color that nod to Richard Diebenkorn, Pierre Bonnard, and Tracey Emin. Mythological undercurrents surface too: Lilith, the rebel woman of Jewish folklore, is a touchstone. “There’s something about that Lilith narrative of the woman who is charting her own path, rebelling against the cultural norm,” Levine says. You can also feel the echo of Ninth Street Women—the overlooked heroines of Abstract Expressionism—running through her personal story.
Children painting a mural with Levine in early July at Camp Laurelwood in Madison, Connecticut.
Before devoting herself full-time to her art, Levine left behind a high-paying administrative job and a marriage to pursue a creative life. Now 58, her work is shaped as much by hard-won independence as by the children whose imaginations fuel her murals. “I know when I do a mural project, kids are benefiting, the community’s benefiting, and it’s out there—it’s not rolled up in my studio,” she says.
Finished wall mural at Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale created by Levine and area children.
Those murals—bright, collaborative works created with children in schools and summer camps—form the other half of Levine’s practice. Her process invites kids not just to color within the lines, but to help invent the image itself. “What we see here is every human’s natural ability to create with pure joy,” she says. “I don’t take anything away. I only add to it.”
Mural Levine created with youth at The Art Effect in Poughkeepsie.
Levine’s mural tours have taken her across the Hudson Valley this summer, painting with seven different camps. Back home in her studio, “Experiment Wildly” reflects the same themes of belonging, vulnerability, and radical joy—but here, the story is more personal. These paintings chart her own search for home and safety in a chaotic world, refracted through the lens of motherhood, solitude, and female community.
Visitors to her Queen City Lofts studio next weekend will find an artist unafraid to ask big questions—and bold enough to let joy be the answer. Levine will give an artist talk each day at 2pm.
