Judy Jensen's work has been exhibited at the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan, plus venues in India, Australia, and Switzerland. She is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, and the City of Austin Art in Public Places Collection. She is a 2002 recipient of the John H. Hauberg Fellowship, Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington.

"Jensen is essentially a painter who uses glass as her canvas, creating low reliefs of varied shape and with a smooth, hard surface of glass providing an appropriate support for the highly imaginative, dream-like subjects executed in vivid colors."
-Henry H. Hawley, curator, catalog, Cleveland Museum of Art

"Strangely mysterious scenes consisting [of] religious images, actual social occurances, and the artist's own recollections take us into the realm of symbolic narrative."
-Tomana Makato, writer, catalog, Hokkkaido Museum of Modern Art

"Worlds separated by time and space collide in Jensen's exquisite illusions. A native Texan who now lives in Austin, Jensen has re-invented an old, but seldom-used technique, reverse painting on glass, to conjure hallucinatory effects. Jensen's creations lie somewhere between a collage and a collection, a Wunderkammer of artifacts from her travels and dreams.
-Nancy Bless, art critic, American CRAFT Magazine

"Ever-experimental in her painting technique, Jensen is upping the ante with content. While she continues to draw on the history of art...Jensen is deepening her narrative, and more firmly rooting it in our times. This is a fertile period for the artist, as she expands into new narrative territory."
-Madeline Irvine, artist/art critic, Austin American-Statesman

   The roots of reverse painting on glass can be traced as far back as 1st century Rome, to bowls decorated with gold.

   The earliest clear examples of the technique, dating approximately to 13th century Venice, were called "sgraffito", the Italian word for "scratch". Religious medallions surviving from that period display a combination of paint and gold leaf glued to the back of the piece of glass, which the artist has then drawn through with his etching tool to create the desired image. Over time, the use of paint displaced the gold element, and by the 16th century paint became dominant.

   When the artist sets out to do a reverse painting, she paints on the glass' reverse or opposite side from that which will appear to the viewer. With her mind's eye, the artist must therefore paint a mirror image of what she wishes the beholder to see.