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Paint with Imagination: A Conversation with Katherine Bradford and Nancy Princenthal (SOLD OUT)

  • Portland Museum of Art 7 Congress Square Portland, ME, 04101 United States (map)

Free program in Flying Woman exhibition; registration required


Flying Woman exhibition artist Katherine Bradford joins us in the galleries for a conversation with New York based author Nancy Princenthal about Bradford’s artworks, artistic practices, and themes seen throughout the first museum survey of her paintings.


Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015) received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Her most recent book is Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (Thames & Hudson, 2019). She is also the author of the monograph Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2020). A former Senior Editor of Art in America, where she remains a Contributing Editor, she has also written for the New York Times and many other publications, including Bomb, Hyperallergic, Apollo and the Brooklyn Rail. Her writing has appeared in monographs and exhibition catalogues for a wide range of artists, including Ann Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Gary Simmons, Willie Cole and Lesley Dill. Having taught and lectured widely, she was a longtime faculty member of the MFA Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts, and was most recently a visiting lecturer at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

 

Born in 1942, Katherine Bradford is only now receiving due recognition. She unapologetically blazed her own path in the art world, painting daily, and building a community of likeminded artists in both Maine and New York. She is at a pivotal moment in her career, creating some of her most thought-provoking paintings and exploring her biography as an artist, woman, mother, and lesbian. Bradford, who splits her time between New York and Maine, is aware of Maine’s long lineage of nautical painting and builds upon the legacies of Marsden Hartley and John Marin, among others, yet her works transform the genre of marine painting into densely packed, metaphorical realms.