12 Facts About Katherine Bradford

Katherine Bradford began her art career relatively late and has received her widest recognition in her seventies.

Katherine Bradford has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell and Pollock-Krasner foundations and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Katherine Bradford's work belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Menil Collection, among others.

Katherine Bradford was born in 1942 in New York City and grew up in Connecticut.

Katherine Bradford co-founded the Union of Maine Visual Artists and wrote art reviews for The Maine Times.

In 1979, despite disapproval from her family, Katherine Bradford moved to New York City as a single mother to pursue art in closer contact with contemporary painting discourse.

Katherine Bradford enrolled in graduate studies at SUNY Purchase and met her future spouse, Jane O'Wyatt, in 1990.

Katherine Bradford later taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Yale School of Art.

Katherine Bradford is best known for direct, casual, color-saturated paintings of swimmers, boats, and caped flying figures that are noted for their paint handling, rich color-field surfaces, theatrical sense of light, and oblique themes and narratives.

In 2021, Katherine Bradford had major shows at Canada, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and the Hall Art Foundation.

Katherine Bradford has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rappaport Foundation Prize for New England artists, and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Katherine Bradford's work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Menil Collection, Portland Art Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, Hall Art Foundation, ICA Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Portland Museum of Art, Tang Museum, and several college museums, among others.