About.

Jessica Oler is a Conceptual Artist. She holds her Master’s degree in Fine Arts, Bachelor’s degree in Sociology, and three Associate’s degrees in Social Science, Liberal Arts, and Sociology. Upon completion of her graduate studies she was accepted into the Chautauqua School of Art Visual Art Residency. Oler has received multiple invitations to present her work at the University of California Davis Betty Urvine School of Nursing. There she presented the girth of her artistic practice and research endeavors surrounding patient narrative. In 2021 she was invited by Harvard School of Medicine to be one of the three interviewees (patients) for The Healing Power of Stories: Narrative Theory and Narrative Practice. For this course each patient was matched with a medical student to “coach the students through the process of working with an individual facing illness to craft their story for a Healing Story Session.”

As of late Oler was invited to the 2022 Rochester Institute of Technology Future Faculty Career Exploration Program.

Through photography, social abstraction, and large photographic installation her practice centers around displacement, histories, and Black geographies. Her present work is involved with space, movement, and history. Oler utilizes socio-political research and patient narrative as a guiding force to work through larger racial, geographical, and social investigations. She continues to work through the  concept of “unprotected Black female flesh” which was initially born from her lived experience with multiple sclerosis thus far. Through her practice the various offshoots of engrained, systemic injustices are investigated. 

Her work has been shown at California College of the Arts, Chautauqua and Brooklyn, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Miami, Florida; Lawrenceville and Atlanta, Georgia; Alameda, Oakland, and San Francisco, California; and Alexandria, New South Wales, Australia.