KATHERINE BRADFORD began painting when she was living in Maine year round in the 70’s. She moved to New York City in the 80’s but continues to return each summer to her home on the coast of Maine.
She is best known for her paintings of swimmers that are inspired by artists such as Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery and Alex Katz. Her work has been the subject of one person shows at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (2013) and at the Modern Museum of Fort Worth Texas (2017) and a major retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art (2022) which has traveled to the Frye Museum in Seattle WA. In Europe her work has been shown in two solo shows at these institutions: In 2024 in Austria at Halle Für Kunst Stiermark, and then at the Hall Foundation Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg in Germany.
Bradford was born in 1942 in New York City and attended Byrn Mawr College (B.A.) and Purchase College (MFA). She is represented in New York by CANADA, in Berlin by Phillipp Haverkampf, in Portland, Oregon by Adams and Ollman, in Milan by Kaufman Repetto, in Tokyo by Tomio Koyuma and in Maine by Caldbeck Gallery.
In 2011 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Joan Mitchel Foundation Award in 2012. Other awards include a Pollock Krasner Grant and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.*
Bradford was a resident faculty member at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2009) and in 2016-2017 was Senior critic at the Yale School of Art in New Haven.
Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Portland Museum (Maine and Oregon), the Dallas Museum of Art and the Menil Collection in Houston Texas and the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine. Recently her work has been acquired by the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chrystal Bridges Museum in ARK, Le Musée d’Art Modern de Paris, and the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC.
*Bradford received the Cummings Award this summer 2026 from the Colby College Museum in Maine for Excellence in Art. The museum acquired two of her paintings which are now on view at the Museum. Her conversation with Museum Director Jackie Terrassa can be seen in this video on Youtube, beginning at 8:42: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyfdSj-QcLs&list=PL_Xwmfwa9ryCv1n0u0ubvRUD6dBLY4I6D.