Mercedes Jelinek

Mercedes Jelinek  is an American artist and photographer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the State University of New York at Purchase and an MFA from Louisiana State University. Mercedes has served as a professor, lecturer, visiting artist, and artist resident throughout the U.S. and Italy, including East Carolina University in Certaldo, Italy, Penland School of Craft, The New School Parsons, and Yale University School of Art. She is a board member of Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, OR) and Penland School of Craft (Penland, NC).

Her work and publications have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. They are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, Library of Congress, Aperture Foundation, and the Getty Institute.

Mercedes specializes in black and white portraiture, often transforming the photographic image through painting and collage. Her visual narratives are driven by her curiosity regarding the variety of humanity, especially the stories of the lives of her subjects. She often travels worldwide, meeting, immersing, and learning about people's values and traditions. The resulting projects reflect her connections and collaborations with her subjects. Her work aims to engage her audience in a visual dialog about community, identity, and women's equality issues experienced in a post-COVID, "Me Too" altered, and Roe vs. Wade overturned world. 

Project Statement | Miscommunicated Secrets 

This project began with obsessive tendencies—the need to make new things based on un-photographable feelings. Sometimes words are not enough, and often, an exclamation mark does not possess the weight or dimension to come close to the sharp sense it represents. These pieces are daydreams combined with real-life experiences assembled to depict emotions that cannot be expressed in sentence form alone.