Jean-Marc Superville Sovak is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and educator whose work critically fabulates around silent histories absent from dominant historical narratives.
Jean-Marc's current projects include There Are NO Black Shakers; A Contemporary Folk Opera, supported by a NYSCA Support for Artists grant, directed in collaboration with violinist Gwen Laster, and performed at the Shaker Heritage Society in Albany, New York. A reprise performance funded by Arts Mid-Hudson's Arts & Culture Project Grant is currently being scheduled for Spring 2025. His a-Historical Landscapes, 19th-century landscape engravings altered to include images from contemporaneous Anti-Slavery publications, have been included in the permanent collections of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.
Jean-Marc's participatory performance works include Freeborn Trails, tracing steps on the Underground Railroad at Hudson Valley historic sites, and a Burial for White Supremacy. Jean-Marc has also earned a reputation as a Reparative Consultant, guiding institutions like Ramapo College of New Jersey in considering its founding family’s fortune in refining sugar and enslaved labor and setting the stage for considering how future scholarships could benefit students of Caribbean descent with a project titled Stolen Sugar Makes the Sweetest Books.
Jean-Marc’s public sculpture, Six of the First, a memorial to some of the first Africans to arrive in Rhode Island, is now part of the Newport Historical Society’s permanent collection. His monuments to Afro-Dutch pioneers, a Rockland County percent-for-art public art project titled Blauvelt Blues, will be unveiled in 2025.
A Bard College graduate (M.F.A. Film/Video), Jean-Marc is the recipient of a NYSCA Support for Artists grant, an Individual Artist’s Commission and an Empowering Artist Award from Arts Mid-Hudson, and his community-based project From the Ground UP commemorating Newburgh’s Colored Burial Ground was awarded several grants from Humanities New York. Jean-Marc’s projects have been exhibited at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery, The Shirley Fiterman Art Center, RecessArt, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Arts Westchester, Socrates Sculpture Park, Katonah Museum of Art, and the Manifesta 8 European Biennial.
Jean-Marc works as Studio Assistant to Marilyn Minter and as an Educator at the Dia Art Foundation and has been a Visiting Artist/Lecturer at Bard College, SUNY New Paltz, Columbia University and Vassar College. In 2020, he was guest curator for "We Wear the Mask: Race and Representation at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art." He lives and works in Plattekill, NY.