JOSEPHINE HALVORSON
B. 1981
Josephine Halvorson makes paintings on-site, face to face with an object in its environment. Often no more than an arm’s length away, she detects variations in texture, light, and temperature, transcribing these perceptions through the medium of paint. The result is an intimate portrait of the object, capturing both a natural likeness as well as the often unseen or overlooked character of her chosen subject.
Halvorson grew up on Cape Cod, where she first studied art on the beaches of Provincetown and with Barnet Rubenstein at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She attended The Cooper Union School of Art (BFA, 2003), Yale Norfolk (2002), and continued her interdisciplinary education at Columbia University’s School of the Arts (MFA, 2007). Her work was most recently presented in the solo exhibitions Josephine Halvorson: On the Ground at the Ogunquit Museum of Art, ME (2022) and Contemporary Voices: Josephine Halvorson (2021) at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, where she was also the Museum’s first Artist-in-Residence in 2019. Other notable solo exhibitions include the Foster Prize Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019); Josephine Halvorson: Measures at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2016) In 2015 she presented her first museum survey exhibition, Slow Burn, at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, curated by Cora Fisher. Her work has been written about extensively in various publications and she is one of the subjects of Art21's documentary series, New York Close Up.
Halvorson has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2021), Moly-Sabata in Sablons, France (2014, 2017), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida (2016); a Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship at the Fondation des États-Unis, Paris (2007-8); and the US Fulbright Fellowship to Austria (2003-4). She was a recipient of the 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and was the first American to receive the Rome Prize at the French Academy at the Villa Medici, Rome, Italy (2014-2015).
Josephine Halvorson has taught at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville Columbia University, and Yale University. Since 2016, Halvorson has served as as Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University. She lives and works in Western Massachusetts.