Josephine Halvorson

Last updated
Josephine Halvorson
Born1981 (age 41–42)
Brewster, Massachusetts
NationalityAmerican
Education Cooper Union (BA)
Columbia University (MFA)
Known forPainting

Josephine Halvorson (born 1981) is an American contemporary painter, sculptor, and print maker based in Massachusetts. She is best known for her on-site paintings, drawing from scenes of the natural world and everyday life. Her work bends material fact and immaterial illusion. [1] Halvorson is a Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University. [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Josephine Halvorson was born and raised in Brewster, Massachusetts. Her mother and father were artists who worked across mediums. [3] As a child, Halvorson spent time in her parents’ metal and blacksmithing shop. [4] Metal and utilitarian object later reappear in Halvorson's paintings. [5] While still in high school, Halvorson took life drawing classes, studied with Barnet Rubenstein at the School of Museum of Fine Arts and practiced painting on Cape Cod beaches. [2]

Halvorson received a Bachelor of Arts from Cooper Union in 2003 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2007. In 2002, she attended a six-week intensive program at the Yale University School of Art in Norfolk, Connecticut. [6] Following her graduation from Cooper Union, she was granted a Fulbright fellowship in Painting to Vienna. [2]

Career

Artistic practice

Halvorson primarily paints en plein air. [7] Her scenes often depict areas found in her everyday life and natural environment, such as books, doors, windows, post-industrial machines and areas of ground. Through her practice of painting on-site and in one continuous session, her paintings are able to mark the time and place of their own creation. Halvorson's work investigates how place and environment manifests in a painting. [4]

Halvorson views her scenes as "active objects," interacting with the artist and inhabiting their own field of scale, shape, and texture across her canvas. [6] Halvorson's work is interested in a distinction and relationship between material and medium. [3] Speaking with artist Firelei Báez, Halvorson said "I’ve come to think of my practice as a collaboration between me, my materials, and the world, where the painting becomes a testament to time spent together." [8] Scale—perceptual, psychological, and literal—heavily influences Halvorson's work. [4] Paintings in Halvorson's 2017 solo exhibition As I Went Walking at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. include hand drawn tape measures and standardized units  at the top of canvases. [9] The translation of physical site onto canvas through her paintings often figures as a trompe-l'oeil, as the boundary between the space of the artwork and the space of the viewer becomes blurred.    

Halvorson's first solo museum show, Slow Burn, was exhibited in 2015 at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Curated by Cora Fisher, the exhibition featured over twenty oil paintings by Halvorson, each one painted over the course of a single day. [7]

In 2016, Halvorson created three site-specific sculptures for her first outdoor exhibition at Storm King Art Center. Her large, painted wooden rulers function as both art object and perceptual tool, emphasizing the human labor of painting with the massive scale of the surrounding environment. [10] "I was hoping it would align with certain natural features that you could almost measure — the length of the ridge of a mountain or the distance between trees,” Halvorson said of her giant measuring devices, “It is always changing based on your orientation to it.” [11]

Halvorson's painting have appeared at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami beach. [12] She is one of the subject of Art21's award-winning digital documentary series New York Closer Up. [13]

Academia

Halvorson is a Professor of Art and the Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University. [2] From 2010 to 2016, she served as Critic and Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art MFA program in Painting. She has also taught at The Cooper Union, Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and Yale University. [14]

Selected exhibitions

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nancy Spero</span> American artist (1926-2009)

Nancy Spero was an American visual artist. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She married and collaborated with artist Leon Golub. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero had a career that spanned fifty years. She is known for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present in such epic-scale paintings and collage on paper as Torture of Women (1976), Notes in Time on Women (1979) and The First Language (1981). In 2010, Notes in Time was posthumously reanimated as a digital scroll in the online magazine Triple Canopy. Spero has had a number of retrospective exhibitions at major museums.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kara Walker</span> African American painter and installation artist

Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Herbert Woodbury</span> American painter

Charles Herbert Woodbury, was an American marine painter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Bradford</span> American visual artist

Mark Bradford is an American visual artist. Bradford was born, lives, and works in Los Angeles and studied at the California Institute of the Arts. Recognized for his collaged painting works, which have been shown internationally, his practice also encompasses video, print, and installation. Bradford was the U.S. representative for the 2017 Venice Biennale. He was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in 2021.

Josiah McElheny is an artist and sculptor, primarily known for his work with glass blowing and assemblages of glass and mirrored glassed objects. He is a 2006 recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program. He lives and works in New York City.

Lois Dodd is an American painter. Dodd was a key member of New York's postwar art scene. She played a large part and was involved in the wave of modern artists including Alex Katz and Yvonne Jacquette who explored the coast of Maine in the latter half of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janet Fish</span> American painter

Janet Fish is a contemporary American realist artist. Through oil painting, lithography, and screenprinting, she explores the interaction of light with everyday objects in the still life genre. Many of her paintings include elements of transparency, reflected light, and multiple overlapping patterns depicted in bold, high color values. She has been credited with revitalizing the still life genre.

R. H. Quaytman is an American contemporary artist, best known for paintings on wood panels, using abstract and photographic elements in site-specific "Chapters", now numbering 35. Each chapter is guided by architectural, historical and social characteristics of the original site. Since 2008, her work has been collected by a number of modern art museums. She is also an educator and author based in Connecticut.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leslie Hewitt</span> American artist

Leslie Hewitt is an American contemporary visual artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leonardo Drew</span> American contemporary artist (born 1961)

Leonardo Drew is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He creates sculptures from natural materials and through processes of oxidation, burning, and decay, Drew transforms these objects into massive sculptures that critique social injustices and the cyclical nature of existence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xaviera Simmons</span> American contemporary artist (born 1974)

Xaviera Simmons is an American contemporary artist. She works in photography, performance, painting, video, sound art, sculpture, and installation. Between 2019 and 2020, Simmons was a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard University. Simmons was a Harvard University Solomon Fellow from 2019-2020. Simmons has stated in her lectures and writings that she is a descendant of Black American enslaved persons, European colonizers and Indigenous persons through the institution of chattel slavery on both sides of her family's lineage.

Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.

Helen Anne Molesworth is an American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles. From 2014 to 2018, she was the Chief Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennie C. Jones</span> American artist

Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.

Deana Lawson (1979) is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.

Erin Shirreff is a Canadian artist who works primarily in photography, sculpture, and video.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paula Wilson</span> American artist

Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.

Brenda Goodman is an artist and painter currently living and working in Pine Hill, New York. Her artistic practice includes paintings, works on paper, and sculptures.

Jennifer Packer is a contemporary American painter and educator based in New York City. Packer's subject matter includes political portraits, interior scenes, and still life featuring contemporary Black American experiences. She paints portraits of contemporaries, funerary flower arrangements, and other subjects through close observation. Primarily working in oil paint, her style uses loose, improvisational brush strokes, and a limited color palette.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Cordova</span> Interdisciplinary artist

William Cordova is a contemporary cultural practitioner and interdisciplinary artist currently residing between Lima, Peru; North Miami Beach, Florida; and New York.

References

  1. ↑ Johnson, Ken (2014-02-13). "Josephine Halvorson and Burt Barr". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-03-03.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Josephine Halvorson joins CFA as Professor of Painting | College of Fine Arts". www.bu.edu. Retrieved 2018-12-20.
  3. 1 2 "Beer with a Painter: Josephine Halvorson". Hyperallergic. 2014-04-26. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
  4. 1 2 3 Bui, Phong (2011-11-02). "JOSEPHINE HALVORSON with Phong Bui". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
  5. ↑ "New American Paintings". www.newamericanpaintings.com. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
  6. 1 2 "Yale University School of Art: Josephine Halvorson". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 2018-12-20.
  7. 1 2 3 "Josephine Halvorson: Slow Burn". SECCA - Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2018-12-20.
  8. ↑ Siegel, Katy (2010). Americanana. New York: Hunter College Art Galleries.
  9. ↑ "As I Went Walking : Josephine Halvorson". www.josephinehalvorson.com. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
  10. 1 2 "JOSEPHINE HALVORSON". stormking.org. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
  11. ↑ Hodara, Susan (2016-06-24). "At Storm King, a Landscape of Stars, Rulers and Pipes". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2018-12-20.
  12. ↑ "Josephine Halvorson". Art Basel. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
  13. ↑ "Art21 Library". Art21. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
  14. 1 2 "JOSEPHINE HALVORSON". www.sikkemajenkinsco.com. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
  15. ↑ "Gray Matters | Wexner Center for the Arts". wexarts.org. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
  16. ↑ "AS I WENT WALKING". www.sikkemajenkinsco.com. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
  17. ↑ "The Lure of the Dark Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night". MASS MoCA. 22 September 2017. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
  18. ↑ "Josephine Halvorson". The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Retrieved 2023-03-27.
  19. ↑ "Josephine Halvorson: On the Ground". Ogunquit Museum of American Art. Retrieved 2023-03-27.
  20. ↑ "Josephine Halvorson: Unforgotten". Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Retrieved 2023-03-27.
  21. ↑ "2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize | icaboston.org". www.icaboston.org. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
  22. ↑ "2021 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellows | gf.org". gf.org. Archived from the original on 2022-01-09. Retrieved 2022-03-09.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.