Jack Pierson

Jack Pierson studied at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The recorded working language is English. Work by Jack Pierson is recorded in the collections of Städel Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Name — Jack Pierson • Born — 1960 • Birthplace — Plymouth, Massachusetts, U.S. • Education — Massachusetts College of Art and Design (BFA, 1984) • Known for — * Photography • word sculptures • collage • installation art • Movement — Boston School • Website — jackpiersonstudio.com Jack Pierson (born 1960 in Plymouth, Massachusetts) is an American artist and gallerist. Pierson is known for his photographs, collages, word sculptures, installations, drawings, and artist's books. His works are held in numerous museum collections.

Pierson graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1984 with a bachelor's in fine arts. He spent his last year of college at Cooper Union as part of an exchange program.

Commissioned in 1997 by the artistic collective Bernadette Corporation, Pierson's video Past Life in Egypt is a collaboration with Ursula Hodel, who plays a glamorous dominatrix recounting her past life as a queen of Egypt.

Pierson is represented by Xavier Hufkens, Thaddaeus Ropac, Regen Projects, and Lisson Gallery (since 2022).

In 2023, Pierson opened an art gallery in Chinatown, New York, intended as an "homage to the gay shopkeepers who thrived downtown in the '80s and '90s", and described by Hilton Als as "a jewel box of a space devoted to delicate ideas strongly executed." Its interior was designed by Fernando Santangelo. In 2025, the gallery opened a location in Miami. Its name is taken from a character in The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, of whom Pierson said, "They didn't say he was homosexual but you just knew."

Pierson is openly gay.

Pierson is considered part of a group of photographers known as the Boston School, which includes David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and twins Doug and Mike Starn, among others. All of them knew one another in the early 1980s and photographed their immediate circle of friends in situations that were, or appeared to be, casual or intimate. • Illustration — Self-Portrait #4 (2003), from Pierson's Self Portrait series, exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial In 2003, Pierson published Self Portrait, a book of photographs featuring 15 images of men arranged to suggest the arc of a lifetime, beginning with a young boy and progressing to old age; none of the images is of the artist himself. His "Self-Portrait" series was shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Pierson's work is regularly commissioned for magazines, and he has undertaken photography projects for several luxury fashion houses. Commissioned by the Italian luxury label Bottega Veneta, he photographed models Liya Kebede, Karmen Pedaru, and Alexandre Cunha for the 2012 spring/summer ad campaign in Coconut Grove, Florida.

Pierson began making his Word Sculptures in 1991, utilizing found objects: mismatched letters salvaged from junkyards, old movie marquees, roadside diners, Las Vegas casinos, and other forsaken enterprises. These works spell out individual words or phrases. In 2025, the Obama Foundation commissioned Pierson to create a sculpture spelling out "hope", one of President Barack Obama's core campaign slogans, with found letters for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

In 2006, inspired by an earlier series of pencil drawings from an old postcard of a woman's face, Pierson produced a suite of twelve large-scale silkscreen paintings: linear graphics in black ink on off-white linen. In a group of what Pierson refers to as "first page drawings", he copies the first page of books by Barbara Pym, Jean Rhys, Sister Wendy, and Marilyn Monroe, among others, on 11 x paper.

Pierson's work is held in public collections internationally, including: • Art Institute of Chicago • Irish Museum of Modern Art • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art • Metropolitan Museum of Art • Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago • Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami • Museum of Modern Art • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art • Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art • Whitney Museum of American Art