Katherine Bradford

Katherine Bradford (born 1942), née Houston, is an American artist based in New York City, known for figurative paintings, particularly of swimmers, that critics describe as simultaneously representational, abstract and metaphorical. She began her art career relatively late and has received her widest recognition in her seventies and eighties. Critic John Yau characterizes her work as independent of canon or genre dictates, open-ended in terms of process, and quirky in its humor and interior logic.

Bradford has exhibited internationally, at venues including MoMA PS1, Campoli Presti (London and Paris), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, and Tomio Koyama (Tokyo). She has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell and Pollock-Krasner foundations and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Portland Art Museum, among others.

Bradford lives with her spouse Jane O'Wyatt, in New York City and Brunswick, Maine, and works out of a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.