Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, New York, NY)
Katherine Bradford is a painter whose luminous, poetic works straddle abstraction and figuration, often depicting swimmers, flyers, and solitary figures against vast fields of color. Her canvases pulse with cool horizons, shifting planes, and bodies that hover between weight and buoyancy, enacting moments of tension, hope, and introspection. Drawing on gestures both spare and expressive, Bradford gives metaphorical depth to scenes of flight and immersion, where sky, sea, and human presence dissolve into one another.
Bradford earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 1964 and later pursued graduate studies at SUNY Purchase, where she received her MFA.
She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011) and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2012), and has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Bradford has held positions such as Senior Critic at Yale School of Art (2016–17) and has served as faculty and resident critic at institutions including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Her work has been the subject of major solo and survey exhibitions including Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford at the Portland Museum of Art (2022) and the Frye Museum (2023), as well as Flight Over Water Town at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2024). She has also exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Her paintings are included in prominent public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, Portland Museum of Art, Frye Museum, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.
Bradford divides her time between Brooklyn, NY, and Brunswick, Maine, where the rhythms of sea, light, and seasonal change continue to inform her work.