Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, Books and prints
Website: jenniesmithdrawing.com
Jennie Smith was born in 1981 in San Francisco, California. She earned a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and has lived and worked in San Francisco throughout her career, close to the Pacific coastline that recurs as a subject in her drawings.
Smith’s work entered wide public view in 2006, when her large-scale graphite and watercolor drawing Kite Wars (2004) was included in the Whitney Biennial: Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Whitney acquired the piece for its permanent collection that same year. She has shown regularly at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco since 2006, with solo exhibitions in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2013, and in 2008 she was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. In 2011, Chronicle Books published an illustrated book of folk songs featuring her artwork, The Littlest Birds Sing the Prettiest Songs.
More recently, Smith has developed a project of “biographical maps,” visual renderings of individuals’ memories of the landscapes of their childhood, shown as New Drawings at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley in 2017 alongside new studies of Northern California coastal forms. She continues to live and work in San Francisco.
Smith works primarily in graphite, producing intricate, densely worked drawings that combine close, patient observation of the natural world with an inventive, narrative imagination. Recurring motifs include tangled masses of kites, leaf-like and organic forms, cypress trees, and native coastal grasses, often rendered at a scale and density that reward slow looking. Her work is animated by a fascination with the environment — a willingness to confront ecological fragility alongside a determination to find beauty, wonder, and mystery in what she observes, whether the subject is close at hand, distant, or imagined.
Her more recent “biographical maps” extend this observational practice into psychological territory, translating other people’s memories of childhood landscapes into drawn form and examining how place shapes personal identity.
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