Zibby Jahns

Zibby Jahns is a multimedia artist whose work revolves around reconsidering public space to reckon with loss. Zibby’s artistic practice often extends into research beyond traditionally creative endeavors, recently relating to the overdose crisis, ecological devastation and forgotten genealogy. She works with the solid or “verifiable” research that enables rich knowledge of histories, people, and places, as well as the speculative ones that allow us to make knowledge from fragments and stories, ultimately allowing us to question colonial narratives of history making. 

Her recent work, while materially and thematically distinct, creates new archives: stone carvings marking ecological extinctions installed in a 17th-century cemetery (Here Lies the Rub, Old Dutch Church, NY, 2026); hand-printed paper ephemera to explore borders and spirituality (Unfolding Complication, CPW Kingston/1080press, NY, 2025); a fictive film unpacking our relationship with extraction (Forecasts and Elegies, LA, 2025 and HDTS, CA, forthcoming in 2027); edited sound recordings as an aural map of time (Bootleg Life Soundtrack, cassette series, 2024); a botanical survey with Peri Lee Pipkin of rare Nevada wildflowers that will likely be destroyed by the creation of a lithium mine (Nature of Resources, NV, 2023); a steel public grief sculpture responding to the correlation between abandoned industrial architecture and the overdose crisis (Reckoning Place, Wheaton College, MA, 2021). Zibby was awarded a Maharam Fellowship in 2021 to research destigmatized ways of visually depicting people who use drugs and facilitated design studios with the Center for Complexity to design Rhode Island’s first Harm Reduction Center. 

Zibby has performed around the world for over two decades, including at The Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans, LA), The Tank (New York, NY), The Dream Community (Taipei, Taiwan), Theater for the New City (New York, NY), The Music Box Village (New Orleans, LA), Hell & Gone (Brooklyn, NY), New Orleans Public Library (New Orleans, LA), Parse Gallery (New Orleans, LA), and Scott Edwards Gallery (New Orleans, LA). Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Mehle Gallery (Arabi, LA) and Old Dutch Church (Kingston, NY) and in group shows including the Center for Photography (Kingston, NY), Antenna Gallery (New Orleans, LA), World’s Fair Gallery (Providence, RI), Eli Marsh Gallery (Amherst, MA), Winslow House (Vallejo, CA), Central Contemporary Art (Providence, RI), and The Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture (Weed, CA). Zibby has been teaching studio art for 20 years, most recently at Amherst College, RISD, and Wheaton College.