Collection: Candy Jernigan

Candy Jernigan (1952–1991) was an American artist based in New York whose practice centred on obsessive, taxonomic documentation of everyday urban detritus — trash, cigarette butts, drug paraphernalia, bottle caps and other street-level debris — rendered in meticulous watercolour and presented alongside handwritten notations. Her work occupies a space between archive, still life and conceptual inventory, treating the material residue of the city as evidence of social behaviour and human habit. She was closely associated with the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s and exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. A posthumous survey of her work, Evidence, was published in 1999.