(b. 1985, Northfield, Minnesota) is an artist living and working in New York City and Kent, Connecticut. His figurative paintings are most often sourced from popular culture, the entertainment industry, sports, and the internet. He is inspired by narratives focusing on romance, celebrity, tragedy, the inevitable destruction of innocence in contemporary American life. In a 2019 Artforum cover story featuring McKinniss, the novelist and critic Gary Indiana writes, “Sam’s recent paintings suggest a deft, saturnine, facetiously sincere autobiography of taste and tastelessness that reveals less about the artist than the spectator, though in this case, the artist is spectator, too. These paintings…are really unlikely things, samples from the blazing horror vacui we inhabit as alleged global citizens, ergo very familiar, but suffused with pathos, even suffering, as well as with flash and comic incongruity.”
Recent institutional group shows include Day for Night: New American Realism at Palazzo Barberini, organized by the Aishti Foundation, Rome (2024); Friends & Lovers at FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2023); Dark Light: Realism in the Age of Post-Truths curated by Massimiliano Gioni at Aishti Foundation, Beirut (2022); and Pictus Porrectus Reconsidering the Full Length Portrait , at the Isaac Bell House in Newport, RI (2022). His work is held in the permanent collections of the Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA.
