Recognized since the early 1990s as a pioneer of contemporary installation art, Jessica Stockholder uses a combination of paint, found objects, and architectural interventions. Her work erodes the boundaries between mediums, echoing color field painting and post-painterly abstraction even as they defy flatness. They are largely improvisational, using blocks of bright color as springboards to leap from one type of surface to another. As the artist has stated, "I began, and still do begin, with a love for color and unrelenting interest in the intersection of a pictorial way of looking, (or thinking), with the physical matter of the body and the materiality of things in space."

She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Dia Art Foundation, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her public commissions have included installations in New York's Madison Square Park and Chicago's Loop area. She is the recipient of the Smithsonian's Lucelia Artist Award (2007), as well as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.