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June 25 through September 11, 2022

The first museum survey dedicated to the extraordinary paintings of Katherine Bradford.

Katherine Bradford (United States, born 1942), Woman Flying, 1999, oil on canvas dropcloth, 84 x 72 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Museum purchase with support from the Friends of the Collection, 2012.14. © Katherine Bradford

In summer 2022, the PMA is proud to host Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford, the first solo museum survey of the painter’s work. Bradford’s figures, who often defy society’s expectations of women and all genders, serve as surrogates for a mother, painter, and lesbian coming of age at the turn of the 21st century. The performance of paint on the canvas—her modus operandi—activates her characters who collectively chronicle her life and present universal themes of humanity as they float, swim, dive, and commune in candy-colored cosmos of ethereal abstraction and terrestrial routines of daily life.

Flying Woman highlights Bradford’s ongoing commitment to abstraction, figuration, and color. She is widely applauded for her vibrant palette, eccentric compositions, and her approach to narrative and figurative painting in a wholly personal, unpredictable way. Organized chronologically from 1999 to the present, the exhibition explores her bathers, swimmers, superheroes, friends, and strangers for the very first time.

Consisting of approximately 40 paintings, Flying Woman offers an intimate presentation of the artist’s oeuvre and properly positions Bradford as a key figure within the canon of American painting from the late 20th century. The PMA and Rizzoli are co-publishing a fully illustrated catalogue that will feature scholarly essays by curator Jaime DeSimone and art historian Nancy Princenthal, as well as an artist-curator interview.

Organized by the PMA’s Robert and Elizabeth Nanovic Curator of Contemporary Art, Jaime DeSimone, the exhibition will premiere at the PMA in summer 2022 and then travel to the Frye Art Museum in winter 2023.

For Flying Woman wall text and translations, please click here.

Explore the exhibition online

Opening Conversation with artist Katherine Bradford and exhibition curator Jaime DeSimone

About the Artist

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.

 

Upcoming Programs & Events

In the News

PMA Magazine
Hyperallergic: The Top 50 Exhibitions of 2022
Hyperallergic: The Top 50 Exhibitions of 2022

The PMA’s summer exhibition Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford made Hyperallergic’s list of the top 50 exhibitions around the world in 2022. Read what they had to say here!

The New Criterion: Heroes forever and ever
The New Criterion: Heroes forever and ever

Thirty years of canvases—likable, honest, and lively to a one—justify themselves on the museum walls of the PMA’s “Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford.”

Hyperallergic: The Vulnerable Painterly Worlds of Katherine Bradford
Hyperallergic: The Vulnerable Painterly Worlds of Katherine Bradford

In Bradford’s color-infused world of superheroes and swimmers, viewers and her figures bathe together outside of time and space.

Two Coats of Paint: Five Things: Katherine Bradford at Portland Museum of Art
Two Coats of Paint: Five Things: Katherine Bradford at Portland Museum of Art

Check out visitors Julie Torres and Ellen Letcher’s review of Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford on the art blog Two Coats of Paint.

Maine Home and Design: An Exhibit from Maine - Artist Katherine Bradford Takes Flight
Maine Home and Design: An Exhibit from Maine - Artist Katherine Bradford Takes Flight

How does a superhero become superhuman? Friedrich Nietzsche can offer some guidance: “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”

Brooklyn Rail: Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford
Brooklyn Rail: Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford

“Full circle” is the phrase that comes to mind apropos Katherine Bradford’s exhibition Flying Women at the Portland Museum of Art. Organized by Jaime DeSimone, these forty or so paintings span twenty-two years of her life as an artist, an existence that began much earlier in Maine when she was a wife and mother of young twins.

Galerie Magazine: The 10 Best Art Exhibitions to See Around the World This Summer
Galerie Magazine: The 10 Best Art Exhibitions to See Around the World This Summer

Her survey show at the Portland Museum of Art begins with a 1999 painting of a flying women, which was first shown at the museum in 2001, and continues through to swimmers in communal groupings and faceless people helping other people.

W Magazine: Katherine Bradford’s Long and Winding Road
W Magazine: Katherine Bradford’s Long and Winding Road

Katherine Bradford’s journey was as unfathomable as the opaque purpled seas and dark skies in many of her paintings, but at 80, the artist, who as a young mother fled rural New England with her young children to live in New York City, has her first major museum survey this summer.

New York Times T Magazine: Floating Figures by Katherine Bradford
New York Times T Magazine: Floating Figures by Katherine Bradford

Across more than 40 paintings, the show traces her technical evolution — from single subjects to ensembles, from oils to acrylics — as she returns to what she calls her “bag of tricks”: swimmers, caped superheroes, floating horizontal bodies.

Portland Phoenix: ‘Woman Flying:’ Maine artist Katherine Bradford is going like 60 at 80
Portland Phoenix: ‘Woman Flying:’ Maine artist Katherine Bradford is going like 60 at 80

“Woman Flying,” the 1999 painting that inspired the show’s title, is now in the PMA collection. It depicts a nude, red-caped woman trying to fly. That’s what Bradford has been doing for more than 40 years and she has succeeded. At 80, she is going like 60.

Foundation Support:

 
 

Girlfriend Fund

Corporate Support:

The Bear Bookshop, Marlboro, VT

Catalogue Support provided by:

 
 

This exhibition is part of Art for All.  

Art for All supports the PMA's dedication to being an open, accessible, inclusive, and welcoming museum for all, through exhibitions and programs that reflect our community and create experiences with art that strengthen our bonds and bring us together.  

Individual Support: 

Anonymous (2)
Judy and John Adelman
Justin and Rachael Alfond
Louise Bessire
Sheri and Joe Boulos
Marion Freeman and Corson Ellis
Eileen Gillespie and Timothy Fahey
Shannon C. Gordon
Cyrus Hagge
Alison and Horace Hildreth
Douglas and Sharyn Howell
John and Hilary Isacke
Bree LaCasse and Chris Moore
Karen L. McDonald
Anne and Vince Oliviero
Alexander Porteous
Christopher N. Robinson
Richard and Alice Spencer
Stewart and Elizabeth Strawbridge
Amy Woodhouse and Tobey Scott

Special thank you to Isabelle and Scott Black

Foundation Support:

Funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts

 
 

Elmina B. Sewall Foundation

Franklin P. and Arthur W. Perdue Foundation, Inc.

P.W. Sprague Memorial Foundation

Corporate Sponsors:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

TD Bank, through the TD Charitable Foundation

 
 
 
 
 
 

Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford

 
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