Katherine Porter (1941 or 1944 – April 22, 2024) was an American visual artist. Porter is considered one of the most important contemporary artists associated with Maine. She resisted categorization. Through the medium of painting and drawing her canvases convey the conflict inherent in life. She expressed her ideas with a visual vocabulary that was "geometric and gestural, abstract and figurative, decorative and raw, lyric and muscular." Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tel Aviv Museum in Jerusalem.

Early life and education

Katherine Louanne Pavlis was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and grew up in rural Iowa. Her birth date has been given variously as September 11, 1944 and 1941. She moved to Colorado in the late 1950s, studying at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado from 1959–1961. She also studied at Boston University, where her teachers included Conger Metcalf and Walter Tandy Murch.

While living in Colorado Katherine met Stephen Porter, a sculptor and the child of photographer Eliot Porter and his wife Aline Kilham. Stephen and Katherine were married on January 28, 1962,

As a couple, they traveled to South America, spending time in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, and Peru. Katherine Porter's concern for the political and social conflict in South America is shown in many of her works, including Swann's Song (1975). She was part of The Studio Coalition in Boston's South End, combining artistic and political concerns.

In 1971, she held her first solo exhibitions, and sold her first work to collector Betty Parsons.

In 1972, Porter moved to New Mexico,

During this period, works such as her Swann's Song (1975) built upon a grid to achieve three-dimensional effects.

Katherine Porter received an honorary doctorate from Colby College in 1982

Porter died at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 22, 2024.

Style

Bibliography

Further reading

See also

  • Boston Expressionism

References

  • Katherine Porter works in the Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • Katherine Porter works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Katherine Porter works in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
  • Katherine Porter works in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • Lecture on her work: Katherine Porter, Cornell University Lecture Tape Series, 1984