SANTA FE, NM.- The Georgia OKeeffe Museum welcomes its first Artist-in-Residence, Josephine Halvorson. A painter from Massachusetts, she joins the OKeeffe through August 28, 2019, to interact with the Museums collection and the northern New Mexican landscape, prompting new artistic creations. Her results will feature as part of the Museums 2020 installment of its ongoing Contemporary Voices series.
Halvorson frequently works in the plein air tradition, painting outdoors. Its not about copying so much as it is about translating a sensation, the experience of being in a place and paying attention to something over the course of many hours, she says. Her artistic practice also includes sculpture, printmaking, and drawing.
Halvorson grew up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she first studied art on the beaches of Provincetown. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Cooper Union School of Art in New York; and the Yale Norfolk School of Art. She also received her MFA at Columbia Universitys School of the Arts. In 2016, Halvorson joined Boston University as Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting.
Her art has exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, and the Storm King Art Center in New York. Halvorson was also a featured subject in the documentary series Art21. She has received multiple fellowships and awards throughout the United States as well as Europe, and recently participated in the Havana Biennial in Cuba.
While at the OKeeffe, the artist will spend time at the Museums sites in Santa Fe and Abiquiú, New Mexico. Much of her experience will concentrate on the dramatic landscape at Ghost Ranch, which inspired many of Georgia OKeeffes most iconic paintings. Says Halvorson, I think [Georgia OKeeffes] advice to take time to look, really turned out to be at the root of my practice. And now, more than ever, its such a critical question: how we choose to use our time. What we choose to look at, and how.