By the mid-1970s, Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941, Long Beach, CA, d. 2022, New York) had emerged as a leading American artist of her time—particularly following the landmark presentation at Paula Cooper Gallery of Rhapsody (1976), Bartlett’s magnum opus, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bartlett’s first survey exhibition was held in 1985 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Philadelphia, among others. In 2006, the Addison Gallery of American Art surveyed Bartlett’s early enameled steel plate paintings in the period from 1968–76. In 2013-14, Klaus Ottmann curated her second traveling survey, which visited the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Parrish Art Museum, New York. In 2014, the Cleveland Museum of Art united her three monumental plate pieces in the exhibition “Epic Systems.” Bartlett’s works can be found in numerous public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Naoshima Museum, Japan; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Gallery, UK; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
