“Informed by her scientific inquiry, Wightman’s art poetically articulates the incongruities between our current economic growth paradigm (conceptually unlimited) and our emerging notion of sustainability (limited by finite resources). Her work captures a visual language of embodied form moving through cycles of destruction and creation within a finite landscape.”

— Nathalie Blanc & Barbara Benish in Form, Art and the Environment: Engaging in Sustainability 2018

“In Gowanus Canal, a portrait of the disreputably putrid smelling, toxic waterway in south Brooklyn, we once more begin with the water’s surface. But in this case it resembles anything but water when first observing this colorful, chemical-saturated muck, seen in closeup and looking more like the expressionistic splashes of pigment in an action painting by Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock.”

– Joel Schlemowitz for Boog City, referring to the Sarah Christman’s documentary of the mud painting of the Gowanus Canal.

“This living art, comprised of organic matter, demonstrates the “fluidity and transformation” of biological systems. Instead of visualizing research results with charts and graphs, which represent data as it was at one moment in time, her art is a living window, showing natural processes as they occur, over time.”

-Tamara Skully, in “Living expressions of science: Cornell researcher doubles as mud and manure artist” for Progressive Dairy, 2016

“Jeni Wightman's project won't guarantee that science is taught objectively in all schools, or that non-alternative facts will triumph over alternative ones. But it does help us understand how ideas replicate, how culture creates structures for the transmission and preservation and evolution of knowledge and truth. How one particular story is never the end of the story. It reminds us that print was not the real revolution. The real revolution was language itself, a virus, or its own kind of DNA, a way of encoding and replicating content separate from the content itself. In the beginning was the word.”
– Ginger Strand in the Pacific Standard — Evolutionary biology meets Adam and Eve in the archives 2017

“Paul Brooks wrote in his 1971 book, The Pursuit of Wilderness; “We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it as a living organism.” Jeni Wightman goes there, and takes us with her.”

– Jim Dissette in “A Choreography of Microbes” in The Chestertown Spy 2015

“The artist [Jenifer Wightman] explains that for her ‘De/composition represents beginning, contingencies of cause and effect, interconnectedness, possibilities… Perhaps decomposition is where my hope for this world lies.’ ”
– the last sentence in Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation 2012

“Mud, eggs, chalk, newspaper, water, and a minnow from the pond, steel, glass, carbiners, climbing rope, klemhiest knots — these are the materials that make up Jenifer Wightman’s artpiece called Transect - a landscape painting in the truest sense of the word.”

– Deborah Artman for WGXC, 2012

“an art practice committed to ‘express[ing] the power of science in a non-linear, non-languaged way’ … – in which bacteria are the performers of a potentially ever-evolving colorfield … In doing so, the living of her art both represents the inter-connectedness of life as such and makes palpable the potentiality (and consequences) of such interconnection.”
– Heidi Rae Cooley from her essay “Ecologies of Practice” in the journal of visual culture 2008

“Most recently BioArt has shown the capacity to incorporate and communicate some of the complexity of modern microbiology. Eduardo Kac’s work Genesis operates in this context as it involved the insertion of a synthetic gene sequence, derived from a sentence from the bible, into E. coli. Specimen of Secrecy about Marvellous Discoveries, another of his works, is a series of visually striking, self-sustaining microbiological ecologies, that, like Winogradsky columns in the laboratory, reveal the hidden complexity of the microbial world, but in an art gallery. Jenifer Wightman has also explored this concept in an interpretation of Mark Rothko’s paintings using bacterial ecologies. Other examples of this genre include: bioluminescent furniture and glass vessels; Steven Wilson’s interactive microscope installations in which humans can compete with protozoa or interact with their own microflora; a signature of human intelligence that has been embedded into the genome of Bacillus subtilis; an audio microscope; pictures made from E. coli expressing green fluorescent protein; and Adam Zaretsky’s E. coli which were monitored, not surprisingly, for signs of stress after being exposed to Engelbert Humperdincks’s Greatest Hits for 48 hours!”

-Simon Park in “The Aesthetic Microbe - ProkaryArt and EukaryArt” in Microbiology Today, 2007