Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Public Art
Website: kellyording.com
Kelly Ording is an Oakland-based painter and muralist who graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000. Her practice spans acrylic paintings on canvas and hand-dyed paper, works on paper, collage, and large-scale public murals. Since graduating, she has exhibited her work throughout the United States and internationally, establishing herself as a prominent voice in Bay Area abstraction.
Ording’s work is held in significant institutional and corporate collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Arts Commission Public and Civic Art Collection, the Alameda County Arts Commission, the U.S. Art in the Embassies Program, JP Morgan Chase, Ellie Mae, and Microsoft. She has completed residencies at the Facebook Analog Research Laboratory, Google, and the Kala Art Institute, and received the 2020 Kala Art Institute Master Artists Award. In 2025, her first monograph, LOVE LETTERS, was published by Land and Sea, documenting a four-year arc of her practice.
Ording is represented by pt.2 Gallery in Oakland and has also exhibited with Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, Gilman Contemporary in Ketchum, Idaho, and Stephanie Chefas Projects in Portland, Oregon. She lives in Oakland with fellow artist Jet Martinez, with whom she has collaborated on public mural projects throughout the Bay Area and internationally.
Ording’s paintings occupy the territory between minimalism and representation, built on a foundation of hand-dyed paper or canvas that she prepares before any mark is made. The dyeing process — carried out with large watercolor brushes or by dip-dyeing — introduces an element of chance that she then meets with exacting draftsmanship. Working in acrylics, she layers radiating linework, repeating geometric forms (arches, ovals, diamonds, knots), and carefully calibrated color relationships to produce compositions that feel both rigorously structured and quietly alive.
She separates her output into two modes: abstracted landscapes, developed intuitively, and geometric abstractions, approached with deliberate intention. Close observation reveals embedded references to topography, typography, and natural cycles, but the dominant sensation is temporal — the accumulation of slow, repeated mark-making as a form of meditation and record. As the artist has stated, her goal is to “create paintings that appear minimal at first glance, but are in fact, complex visual records of time, life and experiences.” Beyond the studio, Ording has created large-scale public murals at Clarion Alley and Unity Plaza in San Francisco, at Palega Park Recreation Center, at Genentech’s headquarters, and at the Emeryville Center for Community Life.
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