Living in the Archives with Jenny Odell

Join us for an evening with artist and How to Do Nothing (Melville House 2019) author Jenny Odell. Odell will present her project, Living in the Archives, the result of her SFAC residency with the San Francisco Planning Department. During her time in residence at Planning, Odell discovered unfiled and minimally marked envelopes of snapshots of San Francisco from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. These images of storefronts and streetscapes depict an ever-changing San Francisco through seemingly arbitrary aspects of our distinctive neighborhoods.

Following the presentation will be a short conversation between Odell and Jackie Im, SFAC Galleries Associate Curator.

Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based multi-disciplinary visual artist and writer whose work encourages close observation of the everyday. She has been an artist in residence at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Internet Archive, and Recology SF, and has exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Ever Gold Projects, the New York Public Library, the Marjorie Barrick Museum (Las Vegas), Les Rencontres D'Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), the Lishui Photography Festival (China), and East Wing (Dubai). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Sierra Magazine, and McSweeney’s. Odell has taught studio art at Stanford University since 2013. Her book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was published by Melville House in 2019.