Jake Longstreth

Jake Longstreth (born in 1977) is an American painter who lives and works in Los Angeles. He grew up in Connecticut between the 1970s and the 1990s and watched his rural town fill up with commercial franchises. In 1999 he earned a bachelor's degree from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where he delivered pizzas for a living and hung his first canvases in cafés. In 2005 he completed an MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

His early paintings, made from photographs, depict big-box stores, drive-through pharmacies and red-roofed Pizza Huts. Jake Longstreth works in oil, on canvas or on muslin. His painting follows two paths: the landscapes of Southern California, with their pines, eucalyptus trees and at times the smoke of wildfires, and the commercial architecture of the 1990s, down to vanished chains such as Circuit City or Toys R Us.

The Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco gave him his first solo exhibition in 2006. This was followed by the Monya Rowe Gallery in New York, the Crisp-Ellert Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, with "Pastures and Parking Lots" in 2017, and then Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles. Galerie Max Hetzler showed his work in Berlin in 2024 and in London in 2025. His paintings are in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and the library of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Jake Longstreth is also a musician. With Ezra Koenig he co-hosts the show Time Crisis, broadcast on Apple Music.