Jennifer McCoy is an artist who has worked since the 1990s with Kevin McCoy on multimedia works spanning film, video, software, drawing, painting and installation.,Their work builds subjective databases of narrative material and stages miniature film sets with lights, cameras and moving sculptural elements to create live cinematic events.In 2014 the two created Quantum, one of the earliest tokenized digital artworks.,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired their work Every Shot, Every Episode in the early 2000s.The imagery for Quantum came from several of their earlier works, including an animated gif called Cars that Jennifer had made and a gif from a net art project she and Kevin had made with their friend Torsten Burns in the late 1990s. Kevin minted the Torsten Burns gif on stage at Rhizome's Seven on Seven event that May to create Quantum.
In 2019 the McCoys' Public Key / Private Key donated a 16mm film to the Whitney Museum's Special Collection on the public's behalf, then issued fifty blockchain-based digital certificates naming members of the public as tradable donors of record. The project used the blockchain to record the changing list of donors as the certificates were transferred, gifted or sold, reworking the usual relationship between a museum, its benefactors and its audience. Their work has also entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Speed Museum, and received a Creative Capital Award in 2003 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011.
McCoy teaches as an art professor at Brooklyn College, and their work was included in the group exhibition “Imagine Today”, curated by Anika Meier for EXPANDED.ART.,She has named Robert Ashley, Andrea Fraser and Pakui Hardware among the artists who inspire her.
