Deep Blue: Curated by Katherine Bradford

In recounting her inspiration for the show, Katherine Bradford says:

I heard a newscaster use the phrase “deep blue” in describing an area of the United States and, being a painter, I immediately felt the force of that phrase both visually and politically. It was very reassuring to hear and to picture….

While Barbara Kruger’s Face It (Blue) (2007) can be interpreted as a cynical critique of American advertising and consumer culture, it might also be read as a call to action – prompting us to face the challenges and disappointments of America’s problematic history and current state. Yet, despite the difficult realities we must confront, one might also find comfort in a notion that we remain surrounded by deep blue – in our overhead sky, in the air that we breathe, the water in which we swim, as vast fields of lush color, and even in our triumphant political maps.

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Brunswick, Maine. She received a BA at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and an MFA at SUNY Purchase in New York. Her work has been exhibited extensively in America and in Europe, including at The Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, Texas; MoMA PS 1, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Massachusetts; and Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas, among others. Bradford has been honored with two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Brooklyn Museum (New York), The Portland Museum of Art (Maine), the Art Museum of Portland Oregon; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), the Menil Foundation, Houston (Texas); and the Dallas Museum of Art (Texas), among others. In 2022, a survey of her work will open at The Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine that will travel to three additional U.S. venues.

Deep Blue is presented in conjunction with an exhibition of Katherine Bradford’s own work. Katherin Bradford: Philosophers' Clambake includes over a dozen paintings created in the past 10 years.