Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Photography, Drawing, Printmaking, Film
Website: jordankantor.net
Jordan Kantor was born in 1972 in Westerly, Rhode Island. He studied painting at Stanford University and later earned a PhD in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University. During his time in New York he worked for two years as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where he deepened his engagement with both art history and curatorial practice, and began building a reputation as both an artist and a writer for Artforum. He subsequently moved to San Francisco to join the faculty at California College of the Arts (CCA), where he serves as Professor of Graduate Fine Arts and Painting, and has maintained an active studio practice in the Bay Area ever since.
Kantor has received significant institutional recognition, including the 2008 SECA Art Award from SFMOMA — one of the Bay Area’s most prestigious honors for emerging artists — alongside Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, and Trevor Paglen. His work entered the SFMOMA permanent collection, and he was included in the 2008 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. He has also lectured widely, including at the de Young Museum as part of its guest lecture series, and has curated exhibitions at venues including Ratio 3 in San Francisco.
Kantor’s practice spans painting, photography, drawing, printmaking, and film, united by a sustained inquiry into how images travel and transform as they move through culture. His figurative paintings take news photography, art-historical reproductions, and internet-sourced imagery as their starting point, translating these flat, mediated pictures into large-scale painted compositions that restore physical presence — weight, texture, atmosphere — to subjects stripped of it by photographic reproduction. A recurring concern is the layering of detachment: how a Monet haystack passes from canvas to photograph to digital scan to projected film, accumulating meaning and loss at each step.
Alongside figuration, Kantor works with geometric and gestural abstraction and unconventional materials. A 2013 Ratio 3 exhibition showed canvases made from paint-cleaning rags sewn to unprimed linen — using the detritus of studio process as the finished object — while his Eclipse silkscreen series, acquired by SFMOMA, explores repetition and the limits of reproduction. Whether working in oil, screenprint, or 16mm film, his practice consistently asks how painting can metabolize the overwhelming flood of contemporary imagery.
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