Jennifer Losch Bartlett was an American artist born is 1941 in Long Beach, California. Her work combines abstract and representational styles. She grew up in the suburbs of Long Beach before attending Mills College in Oakland, California and subsequently graduated from Yale University’s school of Art and Architecture at a time when minimalism was the dominant style. Bartlett was best known for her paintings and prints of mundane objects—especially houses—executed in a style that combined elements of both representational and abstract art. The artist also worked with numerous mediums including pencil, ink, conte, oil pastel, gouache, drypoint, aquatint, screen prints, woodcuts, and lithography. When Bartlett's career ended with her death in 2022, the artist was remembered through her prints and paintings, combining a Neo-Expressionst and system-based aesthetic approach.

Bartlett’s monumental piece entitled Rhapsody (1956-76), currently in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection and for which she gained early recognition, is a colorful painting on 987 baked enamel steel plates with silkscreened grids—a format she invented that she was inspired by subway signs in New York City.

Bartlett frequently worked in series and oscillated between painting on steel plates and painting on canvas, occasionally combining the two as she did for her public commission of a two-hundred foot mural for the Federal Building in Atlanta, Georgia. Conceptual and novelistic in practice, her work raises and revisits vernacular themes, including the icon of a house that she developed in her celebrated Addresses series (1976-78). In her early work, both mathematical constructs and conceptual games guided her process, and color indexes permeated by grid-based patterns. 

Jennifer Bartlett’s first retrospective was held in 1985 at the Walker Art Center, MN, and traveled to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. In 2006, the Addison Gallery of American Art presented a survey of Bartlett’s early enameled steel plate paintings in the period from 1968-76. In 2013-14, she had her second traveling survey, Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe—Works 1970-2011, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA, and the Parrish Art Museum, NY.

Bartlett’s works are represented in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, TX; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of Art, NY among many others.