Jack Pierson: The Miami Years Solo exhibition at The Bass Museum of Art

Jack Pierson—born and raised in New England in the 1960s—is a distinctly American artist whose work explores universal themes of desire, memory, loss, and the passage of time. His photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, films, books, and installations express emotional narratives and ways of being in the world. Often associated with a generation of photographers who challenged the boundaries of the medium—Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, and Mark Morrisroe, among others—Pierson likewise came to prominence in the early 1990s with his intimate portrayals of everyday queer life and bohemian culture in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Provincetown, and Miami Beach.

Imbued with the aesthetics of punk and advertising, while employing a dizzying array of visual references, his work has included weathered objects, found furniture, and repurposed commercial signage. Pierson’s commissioned projects for fashion and style magazines are often indistinguishable from his work made for galleries and exhibitions—in fact, they deeply inform each other. Common themes of isolation and waiting, wanderlust and escapism—longing for another place or time—run throughout his work and career. Pierson came of age during the AIDS crisis alongside such contemporaries as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Tabboo!, Robert Gober, and Kiki Smith, artists who tapped the era’s sense of impermanence, fragility, and loneliness—all recognizable themes in Pierson’s work.