The Rose Art Museum opened on the Brandeis campus in 1961. It was named after its founding benefactors, Edward and Bertha Rose. Following a $50,000 donation, the Gevirtz-Mnuchin Purchase Fund was founded. This led to the museum collecting works by several esteemed artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, and Marisol. Today, the collection has ballooned to contain more than 9,000 objects, with a particular proclivity for American art of the 1960s and 1970s.
Even with first-rate artists, donors, and an army of supporters, the Rose nearly collapsed before its 50th birthday. Following the financial crisis of 2009, Brandeis was struggling financially. The president at the time, Jehuda Reinharz, announced that the Rose would be liquidating its collection and closing the museum. Following pushback from faculty and alumni, as well as a lawsuit from the museum overseers, the Rose held onto its collection and name, remaining open to this day. Now, 15 years later, the museum is giving a living painter her first museum exhibition.
The Artist
Jenna Gribbon was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and by her own account was “the kid with the staring problem,” who was more drawn to sketching faces as a child rather than typical classroom subjects. In Knoxville, contemporary art was less prevalent, which led to her being exposed to it later in life, but Impressionist reproductions reached her. A book of Mary Cassatt paintings fascinated her with how lines could develop an image. “Painting opened up the world for me,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in August.
She earned her BFA at the University of Georgia in 2001, moving to New York in 2003. Early in her career, she worked for Jeff Koons, which later connected her with the painter John Currin, with whom she made Rococo-style portraits of Kirsten Dunst for the 2006 film Marie Antoinette. But she struggled to sell her own works, the ones that truly mattered to her. Abstract art seemed to dominate the art market at the time, and she had a change in the type of art she was producing. “So I just made my weird paintings, and struggled to have them shown,” she said. Around that time, she co-founded the Oracle Club, a salon-workspace for writers and artists in Long Island City. After it closed in 2016, she went back to school to earn her MFA from Hunter College.
Around the time she started at Hunter, she met Mackenzie Scott, the singer and songwriter who performs as Torres (not the philanthropist of the same name). They married in 2022, and Scott became the central subject of Gribbon’s work. Gribbon now lives and works in Brooklyn. She is represented by three galleries, and her paintings are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
The Exhibition
Jenna Gribbon: Entwined fills approximately 4,000 square feet of the museum’s Lois Foster Wing with more than 40 paintings. These range from Stiles, a showpiece from her 2001 BFA thesis show, to three canvases commissioned for the Rose and finished this past summer. Sirois curated it with Gannit Ankori, the Rose’s Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator. They started from a list Gribbon provided, then worked around what lenders could send. “Eventually it comes down to telling a story,” said Sirois.
Looking and Being Seen
The show’s main theme seemed to be looking. Gribbon wants you to be perhaps uncomfortably aware that you are looking at a painting. She takes this act and rips you from the comfort of an innocent onlooker and makes you a part of the scene. For example, I Am the Dog (2023) portrays Scott standing over us, looking down, with a dog’s head slightly tilted in the foreground. The scene can easily be dismissed as a woman being stared at and responding in turn. But Scott is standing over us, looking down, and the dog is the couple’s own. “Us is also Jenna,” Sirois said. “Us is the dog.” The curtains stop where you can see their edges. “This is all constructed for you,” Sirois said, speaking for the painting, “’cause we know you’re going to see it.”
The following theme is collaboration. Western art is riddled with beautiful women posed as goddesses, nymphs, and odalisques, passive and arranged like a vase for the enjoyment of others. Gribbon’s subjects are often collaborators in the art. As a performer, Scott is always aware of and thinking about how she is portrayed, and Gribbon says they share a “reciprocal musedom.” Even the hot, unnatural pink Gribbon uses for her subjects’ nipples fulfills a role. “In Jenna’s work, it’s less so nude,” Sirois said. “It’s more so naked.” The color acts as a reminder that “you’re looking at an actual human who lives and breathes.”
The third theme is a callback to the show’s name. The curators seemed to use relational psychology, which examines how people form their sense of self based on their relationships, as a lens. Gribbon paints the same few people over and over and finds something different each time. Sirois asked, “Can you ever really know and see someone truly for who they are?” The paintings suggest you can attempt to as much as you’d like, but each try changes both of them.
Three Picks From the Curator
Adoration for the Way She Occupies a Chair
Sirois’ favorite is one of the smallest paintings in the show. Scott sprawls in an armchair in a pale green suit, nearly monochrome against a green ground, with one hand at her face and her tan boots huge in the foreground. Sirois pushed for it to get its own wall label. “I feel like it’s one of the sexiest paintings in the show because you can feel the love, you can feel the desire for the subject,” Sirois said. To me, she looked powerful, settled into a seat of authority and filling the entire canvas.
What Am I Doing Here? I Should Ask You the Same (2022)
Sirois called this a pivotal moment in Gribbon’s career. Made for the Frick Collection’s Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, it hung in the spot usually held by Hans Holbein’s Sir Thomas More, facing Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell. Gribbon gave Scott a red coat, royal purple, and jewels, set her in an ordinary apartment with a radiator, and had her look straight at the viewer. Gribbon has said she wanted a subject capable of “really intimidating Cromwell.” Sirois called it “a beautiful confrontational portrait.”
My Face on His Face, Warm
Gribbon’s son photographed her on his phone. She projected that image onto his face and painted the result: four eyes, two mouths. She first described the projection as protective. Sirois said it was a way to let the public see her child while still making them “go through her.” Sirois said it is “the one that elicits the most comments. People are jarred by it.” I was one of them. Something about the eyes.
If You Go: Jenna Gribbon: Entwined is on view at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham, through January 3, 2027. Admission is free.
