Featuring Babs Reingold and Jason Hackenwerth
A monthly interview series from Creative Pinellas drawing connections between artists, inspirations, friends and mentors, showcasing the individuals that together make a creative community. Each month an artist interviews another artist in Pinellas County that has been an inspiration to them. The next month the interviewee becomes the interviewer, speaking with a Pinellas artist that has inspired them in turn.
In the third of this series, artist Babs Reingold welcomes her friend and collegue Jason Hackenwerth.Venezuela-born American artist Babs Reingold creates sculptures, drawings and installations, focusing on the environment, poverty and beauty. Reingold has an extensive showing history with solo and group exhibits in galleries and museums from New York to Los Angeles and internationally. Recent exhibits include Water Over the Bridge: Contemporary Seascapes – Morean Art Center • Planet Ax4+1 – David & Schweitzer Gallery Brooklyn NY • Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration – St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts. Her installation, The Last Tree a solo exhibit had a six-month run at Burchfield Penney Art Center Buffalo NY. It had debuted earlier at the ISE Cultural Foundation in SOHO NY. Reingold has work in the permanent collections of the Newark Museum, Museum of Fine Arts St Petersburg, countless private collections, including the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Reingold has a MFA SUNY-Buffalo and BFA Cleveland Institute of Art. Her major studio is in St Petersburg with viewing space in New York City. Current Exhibition: Elements · Tampa International Airport Gallery · Tampa, FL · Jun 23, 2020–Feb 28, 2021
Upcoming Exhibition: Creative Pinellas Arts Annual · Largo FL · November 12–December 6, 2020
Since 2005, Jason Hackenwerth has explored the phenomena of temporality and joy through the transformation of ordinary materials. Currently his public installations take the form of large-scale sculptural installations created from biodegradable natural latex balloons. Inspired by mythology, the human experience, and the ephemeral nature of his chosen medium, each work is at once mysterious, accessible and fun, complementing and responding to its architectural setting. Hackenwerth developed techniques to connect thousands of balloons into rigid, complex forms that when suspended seem to defy gravity and highlight the material’s qualities of translucency, movement and illumination. Audiences around the world have connected with their own inner joy through their experience of Hackenwerth’s delightful organic forms.
Jason received his MFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010 and Bachelor of Fine Art in printmaking from Webster University, 1997.
Press includes, Art Desk, Creative Review UK, American Craft, Design Journal, Art In America, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, London Metro, This is Colossal, Metal Magazine, and Hi-Fructose Magazine.
Grants include: Pollock-Krasner Foundation Inc. 2011 and Creative Pinellas Professional Artist Grant 2018.
He is a professor of art and printmaking at Eckerd College and currently lives and works in St Petersburg FL.
