Jena Thomas (1987-)

Jena Thomas has been awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2025.

Thomas has exhibited extensively in Florida and the Northeast, with exhibitions at the Alvarez Gallery, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Context New York, Art Palm Beach, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Featured in Creative Quarterly magazine and the art publication New American Painting, Thomas is a recipient of the Ruth Katzman Scholarship from the Art Students League of New York and winner of the 701 Center for Contemporary Art Prize. She was also a finalist in Miami University’s Young Painters Competition. Thomas received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA, and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, FL.

Jena Thomas’s work engages in a contemporary dialogue with concerns about land development. The artist assembles a perspective that concerns how human beings “idealize” what nature is and use this as a basis to create artificial environments for us to exist within. However, at times, these perfectly fabricated environments can be deceiving. It is no longer just an issue of domesticating the land to make it livable. Instead, Thomas is concerned with the way we transform our world into a suburban theme park. Through synthetic colors and naturalistic landscapes, she seeks to capture the unnatural oddities of spaces such as swimming pools, miniature golf courses, and the medians used to decorate highways.

Jena Thomas is exclusively represented by Alvarez Gallery