The paintings on this page are from Benjamin's recent series titled United/Divided. The paintings and drawings in this series depict images of protests and marches, the documentation of these events and how they are interpreted. The image above is a painting using a variety of photographs taken of footage from protests in the nineteen-forties. Image (2) is a painting of a parade attended in 2007. Image (3) depicts a 2007 march in Jena, Louisiana.

In her series Unsung Heroes, Benjamin explores the idea of what constitutes an American Hero by immortalizing those Americans that have slipped into the pages of history books with little more than a mention. Her portraits include Mamie Till (Emmett Till’s mother), Lucretia Mott, and Paul Robeson among others.

In Benjamin’s newest series titled United/Divided she examines civil rights in America, the documentation of these events and how we interpret them as history. Depicting the Civil Right Movement, Benjamin references, combines and alters material from civil rights protests and injustices of the past and recent coverage of protests surrounding the "Jena Six". In these paintings, Benjamin provokes the viewer to question how images from the media help form identity and effect historical and contemporary perceptions of the events that shape our lives.

Jessica Benjamin’s paintings focus on how individuals process information in order to form identity. Whether it is in her plein-air paintings she makes on the beaches and winding paths of Long Island, the masked nudes occupying fictional landscapes, portraits of friends and historical figures, or the media images she uses to redefine the process by which we define ourselves as Americans, the questions are always the same: Who am I? Who are you? Who are we together?

Benjamin’s recent work includes the American Series, Unsung Heroes and United/Divided. In each of these series she continues her exploration of identity by merging fact with artistic expression.

In the American Series, Benjamin creates composite portraits, where one identity has been combined with another to create a recognizable face that does not actually exist. In this way she is able to paint a portrait of the United States by painting a composite of its citizens. A slave child’s eyes combined with a rapper’s face give new meaning to the heavy chains he is wearing. The painting of Michael Brown/Dick Cheney is immediately recognizable, ambiguous and chilling. These paintings were shown at The New York Historical Society in March of 2007. They are the cover and interior images of Wynton Marsalis’s CD “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary”.