Jessica Lichenstein: Rewilding

Jessica Lichenstein: Rewilding will transform the Museum’s third-floor gallery into a lush, overgrown terrain, where thousands of digitally rendered female nudes coalesce into forests, ruins, and flowering canopies. A multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans large-scale installation, painting, sculpture, and video, Lichenstein’s densely layered, technicolor landscapes are erotically charged, feminist reimaginings of nature and the female form. 

The exhibition borrows its title from a concept in conservation ecology known as “rewilding.”  In practice, “rewilding” restores natural processes and wilderness areas by withdrawing human intervention and trusting ecosystems to regenerate on their own terms. For Lichtenstein, rewilding serves as a governing metaphor for liberty and release. Merging opulent materials with technological precision, Lichenstein reclaims the female body from art history’s erotic conventions and situates it within a speculative landscape shaped by autonomy and collectivity, unfettered by patriarchy or even the presence of the male figure.

About the artist

Jessica Lichtenstein is a New York– and Wyoming–based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans large-scale installation, painting, sculpture, and video. Working at the intersection of feminist theory, ecological thought, and art history, she has developed a singular visual language in which hyperreal, digitally constructed landscapes—densely populated with tiny female nudes she calls her “tree nymphs”—challenge the long history of the eroticized female body in Western art. Lichtenstein’s work draws on a range of sources, from eighteenth-century pleasure garden painting and the Romantic sublime to the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and the Jungian concept of the shadow self. Her mixed-media paintings incorporate gold, brass, and aluminum leaf alongside UV printing and acrylic, producing surfaces of striking material richness. Her sculptural works embed everyday language—women’s social media texts, intimate and unselfconscious—into concrete and plaster forms, recontextualizing vernacular speech as collective feminist testimony. Jessica Lichtenstein: Rewilding at the Museum of Arts and Design is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.