Jenna Gribbon

Jenna Gribbon (born 1978) is an American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for her figurative paintings whose primary subject is her partner, Mackenzie Scott. Gribbon frequently depicts Scott in candid, everyday scenes or overtly theatrical setups.

Her work has been exhibited at the Frick Collection, Collezione Maramotti, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and appeared in Sofia Coppola's 2006 film, Marie Antoinette.

Early life and education
Jenna Gribbon was born Jenna Brown in 1978 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her parents divorced when she was two, and at the age of five, she moved to an area outside of Atlanta, Georgia with her mother and brother. Gribbon took an interest in art at an early age, and studied drawing and painting at the University of Georgia, graduating in 2001. While at the University of Georgia, she also experimented with film making.

Career
In 2003, Gribbon moved to New York City to pursue a career in art, where she briefly worked as a cocktail waitress and a color technician for artist Jeff Koons. In 2006, she was commissioned to create three portraits for the set of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

In 2010, Gribbon and writer Julian Tepper founded the Oracle Club, a literary salon and artist workspace in Long Island City, Queens. While running the salon, Gribbon continued painting portraits of her friends and family and exhibiting work. When the Oracle Club closed in 2016 due to rising rent, she began studying at Hunter College, graduating in 2019 with her Master of Fine Arts. In 2018, she was commissioned to create a portrait of Elsie Fisher for the film poster of Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade.

After graduating, Gribbon's work largely focused on the exploration of queer identity and sensuality, and she has received positive reviews for her intimate depictions of women and gender in various solo shows. She has cited artists like Édouard Manet, Jacques Rivette, Mary Cassatt, Karen Kilmnik, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard as inspirations for her work.

Gribbon directed the music video for Torres' "Too Big for the Glory Hole" in 2020. In 2021, her paintings appeared in a two-person show at Sim Smith Gallery, alongside the films of Agnes Varda, who Gribbon has cited as an inspiration for her work.

Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. In 2023, Gribbon's work appeared in juxtaposition to Hans Holbein the Younger's portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell at the Frick Collection.

In her introduction for the 2023-24 exhibition titled "Jenna Gribbon: The Honeymoon Show," at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan Gallery, curator Alison M. Gingeras wrote:"Her paintings demonstrate how a muse can also be a full-fledged subject, as opposed to a one-dimensional object of desire, and that looking as well as depicting can be an ethical, equitable exchange, and that desire or love can be conjured reciprocally without recourse to objectification, an ethos similarly articulated in [Celia] Paul's Self-Portrait."

Personal life
As a senior at the University of Georgia, Gribbon married Matthew Gribbon, another artist, though they divorced shortly after. In 2010, she and her then-partner Julian Tepper had a son, Silas. Silas is a frequent subject of Gribbon's paintings, and she has frequently spoken on the impact of motherhood on her work and the sexism she has faced as a mother.

In 2017, Gribbon met musical artist Mackenzie Scott while at a bar in the East Village, and they married in 2022. Scott is the primary subject of Gribbon's portraits in "Personal Life." In addition to directing one of Scott's music videos, Gribbon painted the cover art for Scott's album Silver Tongue.

Gribbon lives and works in Brooklyn.