Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Digital collage, Photography, Installation, Research-based practice
Website: jennyodell.com
Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Oakland, California. She was born in San Francisco in 1986 and grew up in Cupertino, in the shadow of the computing industry whose imagery and infrastructure her work would later take apart. She earned a BA in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 and an MFA in Design + Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010, where she received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award in her department.
Odell’s visual practice developed around archives — finding them, making them, and reading them against the grain. Early series such as Satellite Collections and Satellite Landscapes were assembled from imagery cut out of Google satellite view, while later projects grew out of residencies inside working institutions: Recology San Francisco (the city dump) in 2015, the Internet Archive in 2017, and the San Francisco Planning Department in 2018, where she was the inaugural artist in the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Artist in Residence program. She received a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant in 2013 and has been a Lucas Artists Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, with residency periods in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
From 2013 to 2021 Odell taught internet art and digital/physical design at Stanford University. Her writing grew directly out of the same habits of attention that drive the artwork, and her books How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023) both became New York Times bestsellers — a turn that widened her audience considerably without displacing the exhibition-based practice that preceded it.
Odell works less as a maker of images than as a collector and classifier of them. She has described medium as context, and the raw material of her projects is almost always something that already exists in quantity: satellite tiles, Street View frames, Craigslist listings, scanned advertisements from 1980s issues of BYTE magazine, objects pulled off a conveyor belt at the dump. The method is extraction and arrangement — cutting figures free of their surroundings and setting them in taxonomic grids against flat white ground, so that parking lots, silos, waste ponds, and swimming pools read as specimens rather than terrain.
What holds the work together is a particular quality of attention: patient, faintly comic, and increasingly political as the catalogues accumulate. A grid of landfills seen from above becomes a portrait of consumption; a researched inventory of two hundred discarded objects becomes an argument about labor and supply chains. The work moves fluidly between screen and room, appearing as prints, publications, online archives, and cabinet-like installations, and it consistently asks viewers to slow down enough to notice systems that are designed to go unseen.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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