The Jessica Park Project 

Sponsored by the Fine and Performing Arts Department at MCLA, The Jessica Park Project is a multiyear educational endeavor to study and promote the art of Jessica Park. Park is a nationally renowned artist with autism who lives with her family in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is largely self-taught, but has benefited from the intervention of several art teachers and from the guidance of her mother Clara Claiborne Park, who has written two books on her daughter's pervasive developmental disorder: The Siege and Exiting Nirvana.

To date the Jessica Park Project has produced two exhibitions of Jessica's art, one in 2004 and a traveling show in 2007, The Art and Life of Jessica Park. The current exhibition features over 40 images of Park's work, along with photographs of Jessica working in her studio and posing with her family as well as MCLA students. The Art and Life of Jessica Park opened at MCLA Gallery 51 in downtown North Adams on May 28, 2008 with over 150 attending the gala. The show traveled to Endicott College and was featured in the Visiting Artist's Gallery in the Visual and Performing Arts Center, February 28 through April 3, 2009.  In late April through May, 2009, the exhibition was shown at The Hands On Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and from August 31 through December 21, it was shown at Eastern Michigan University, in the Bruce T. Halle Library.  Then March 1 through April 11, 2010 the show traveled to the Madeleine Clark Wallace Library in Norton, Massachusetts at Wheaton College.  A panel discussion including Professor Tony Gengarelly was held on March 9, 2010 coinciding with the official opening of the show.  The Project is still looking for venues for the exhibition and for educational outreach opportunities related to Jessica and other Artists with Disabilities.

In April of 2008 MCLA published Exploring Nirvana: The Art of Jessica Park, a 96 page book with 86 full color illustrations of Jessica's art. Along with 26 catalogue entries by MCLA students, the book also contains essays from experts in the fields of autism and Outsider Art. Dr. Oliver Sacks introduces Exploring Nirvana with a moving tribute to Jessica and her art. The result of four years of dedicated work by faculty and students, Exploring Nirvana, has been glowingly described by Dr. Pamela Rogers, Director of the book's sponsor, Pure Vision Arts (a Division of the Shield Institute, New York, NY): "an important and comprehensive chronicle that elegantly enlightens us about the life and work of an extraordinary woman and important contemporary artist."

The Jessica Park Project is an ongoing educational endeavor designed to introduce students to museum work and its related skills of promotion and publicity, fund raising, educational outreach and book production. For further information contact Professor Tony Gengarelly, Ph.D.