Jacob Fossum is an oil painter based in Western Massachusetts and Northern Spain. He holds an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA from Utah State University. For fourteen years he taught painting and drawing at Bard College at Simon's Rock, and he now paints full time.
His work has been shown in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Sacramento, the Hudson Valley and Reykjavík, including solo exhibitions at Time Space Limited in Hudson and the Hillman-Jackson Gallery in Great Barrington. He has held residencies at Cill Rialaig in Ireland, Jentel in Wyoming, and SIM and NES in Iceland. In 2026 his painting Sacred Grove won second place in the Viridian Artists Summer Juried Exhibition in New York, juried by Rebecca Ribeiro.
Artist statement
I paint sacred spaces.
In one strand of my work, queer bodies rest inside them: sacred groves, riverbanks, mountain camps, landscapes drawn from an art history that rarely made room for them.
In the other, the bodies are absent and the space itself becomes the subject: cairns stacked by visitors at queer river spots, altars, walls, stones set carefully one on another.
Both strands come from the same conviction: that looking closely is itself a form of devotion, and that the places where queer people gather, and what we build there, deserve the reverence long reserved for churches and temples that were never built for us.
Commissions
Jacob paints commissioned portraits from photographs, so the sitter never needs to visit the studio and the finished painting ships anywhere.
He takes on bespoke work for film and television, offices, hospitality and interior design, and existing paintings are available to rent for productions.
His paintings have appeared on the sets of Bros (Universal), Someone Great (Netflix), Modern Love (Amazon) and The Last OG (TBS).