Jackie Nickerson – Stateside

Stateside is Jackie Nickerson’s sweeping, fragmented visual diary of a decade living and working across the USA. From streetscapes in Chicago to military installations on Hawaii, from Utah landscapes to New York skyscrapers, Nickerson used whatever camera she had at hand—medium format, 35mm, point and shoot, iPhone—to fix raw glimpses of America at this peculiar, precarious time. Her focus was less on specific locations than on repeated motifs, as if these photos could have been taken virtually anywhere in America. Chainlink fences, basketball courts, suburban houses and classrooms, gas stations and even battleships become markers of sameness, and of the functionalism that fuel’s America’s economy.

Unlike other work that explores contemporary America, both as place and idea, Jackie Nickerson avoids ‘definitive’ images as individual works. Instead she made large prints of her work, hung them in an overlapping sequence on her studio wall, and then re- photographed them. The result is a compelling, ongoing narrative of the complex, troubled America of today.

Jackie Nickerson is an American-born British artist. She divides her time between rural north County Louth and London.

Jackie Nickerson is a conceptual documentary photographer. Her work is based on years- long research and is often portraiture; she explores the identities of her subjects and the effects of working in specific environments, such as religious communities in Ireland and farms in South Africa.

Her work has been exhibited in Ireland and internationally at institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Vatican Museums, Rome, and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Her work is represented in the Drogheda Municipal Art Collection, Highlanes Gallery.

The exhibition coincides with a new photobook Jackie Nickerson titled Stateside, published by Steidl, with texts by Tom Downey and Colm Tóibín.

Jackie Nickerson Stateside exhibition and national tour is curated by Aoife Ruane.

Jackie Nickerson

Solo exhibitions include Field Test, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2021, August, FOTOFOCUS, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2017, Jackie Nickerson, Samsøñ Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts, 2016 and UNIFORM: a collaboration with Jackie Nickerson, National Gallery of Ireland, 2015-2016.

Selected recent group exhibitions include GENERAL CONDITIONS, The School │Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2025, A Decade of Collecting, 2012-2022, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 2023, Stressed World, The School │Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2022 and Necessary Trouble: Civil Rights Era Photography and Contemporary Art from the Collection, Girls’ Club Warehouse, Fort Lauderdale, FL, 2021.

Selected Jackie Nickerson’s books include Farm (2002), Faith (2007), Terrain (2013), Field Test (2020) and Salvage (2021), Clad (2025), Stateside (2025).

Jackie Nickerson Stateside A Highlanes Gallery National Tour

2026

Highlanes Gallery: 28 March – 9 May, with the exhibition opening on Saturday 28thMarch at 3pm

Galway International Arts Festival: 13-26 July 2026 and opens along with all GIAF Visual Arts on Sunday 13th July

2027

Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 27 February – 10 April 2027, with the exhibition opening on Saturday 27th February

This exhibition and national tour is enabled by a Touring Grant from the Arts Council of Ireland.