Bal Harbour

Luck of the Draw The story of rising star illustrator Jenny Kroik is as enjoyable as her evocative works. BY CAIT MUNRO 146 BAL HARBOUR FOR MOST ILLUSTRATORS, scoring a New Yorker cover is the pinnacle of career success. For Jenny Kroik, a 35-year-old artist who began pursuing professional illustration when she moved to New York in 2016, it happened both quickly and organically. "I didn't really have a contact, I just found various email addresses and I decided I would just do one a week, different ideas, and send them. I thought, 'Nobody's looking at these probably-disconnected emails I found,'" she recalls. "And then, I got a reply a few months later." She has since done the magazine's cover three times. It's hard to believe, looking at her work, that Kroik has only lived in New York for three years. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia and raised in Israel, she earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2006 and an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2010, where she later taught. "I'm definitely a city girl," she says, confessing that before New York, "I lived in various places where I always felt a bit uncomfortable, like I'm not quite in the right place." In Kroik's illustrations, landmarks like the subway, the Strand, the Met, the New Museum, Eataly, and Bryant Park serve as backdrops for stylishly-dressed women—her subjects are almost always female, and even when they're not, she says, viewers think they are—to live out quietly aspirational urban fantasies. Hers is a picturesque version of the city, with less garbage and traffic jams and more friendly fauna and sidewalk hand-holding than the real deal. Which is, of course, what makes them so enjoyable. For a recent New Yorker series, currently available online, Kroik visited the homes of local collectors to depict what living with art is really like (spoiler: it's pretty wonderful). is also meant rendering paintings by the likes of Kara Walker and LaToya Ruby Frazier, as well as some sharply-observed features of the homes, like a handbag that looks like a dog or a rainbow-shaped cat toy strewn across the floor. While she majored in illustration as an undergrad, she was reticent to pigeonhole herself into one medium too early in her career and also

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