Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Installation, Video
Website: jennieottinger.com
Jennie Ottinger was born in 1971 in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, and moved to California to attend the University of the Pacific, where she earned a BA in Art History in 1994. She went on to complete a BFA in Illustration at California College of the Arts in 2000 and an MFA in Painting at Mills College in 2008. She lives and works in San Francisco’s Bayview district.
Ottinger’s paintings and installations have long taken aim at the social choreography of belonging and exclusion — Catholic school uniforms, sorority rush, cheerleading tryouts — filtered through her own experience of both. In 2010–2011 she held a fellowship at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, where she extended her practice into stop-motion animation, cutting apart painted portraits of characters from Voltaire’s Candide and reassembling them frame by frame to narrate the story. From 2016 to 2018 she was an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, where she developed a body of paintings and animation examining cultural appropriation in competitive cheerleading, inspired by the film Bring It On. She has also received a Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists grant (2013).
More recently, Ottinger’s work has turned toward reexamining public figures through a feminist lens: her 2022 solo exhibition at Rebecca Camacho Presents, her San Francisco gallery, restaged the public life of Princess Diana in a chronological sequence of abstract realist paintings drawn from paparazzi and official photographs. Her work has been shown at venues including the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Johansson Projects in Oakland, Conduit Gallery in Dallas, and Eleven gallery in London.
Ottinger paints in a loose, unpolished, quasi-illustrative style that has been compared to Grant Wood’s archetypal figuration and Marlene Dumas’s unfinished-looking brushwork. Her recurring subjects — boy scouts, cheerleaders, parade-goers, girls in plaid skirts, royalty — are rendered with a dark, wry humor that turns nostalgic and ordinary scenes faintly sinister, exposing the power dynamics, supremacy systems, and quiet violence embedded in group belonging.
Beyond painting, she frequently extends individual canvases into installation and stop-motion animation, cutting apart and physically reassembling painted fragments to narrate a story — a technique she has used to retell Voltaire’s Candide, to examine Amy Winehouse’s debt to Black women singers, and to unpack the racial politics of a cheerleading championship. The result is a practice that moves fluidly between gallery painting and hand-crafted, frame-by-frame animation, always returning to how history, literature, and pop culture stage women’s lives.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.