OMAA is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Josephine Halvorson (b. 1981, Brewster, Massachusetts) from the series, “On the Ground,” which is also the title of her essay published in Art in America (June/July 2018). Each work consists of two components: a central panel depicting a patch of ground seen from above and a frame that incorporates materials from the site where the interior painting was made. Crushed rocks and debris constitute evidence of a place, such as Maine, and screen-printed units of measurement and calibration operate as keys to perception, indicating scale, orientation, and color. Making art outside since her earliest days growing up on Cape Cod, Halvorson pushes against traditional landscape painting and conceptual land art with her practice which, as she has described, is to “translate dimensionality into flatness, mapping the transformation of the real into the realm of metaphor.”
Halvorson studied at The Cooper Union, Yale Norfolk, and Columbia University. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Peter Freeman, Paris. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Foundation, the French Academy in Rome, and the U.S. Fulbright to Austria. In 2021, she opened a solo exhibition as artist-in-residence at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Halvorson is Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University and lives in western Massachusetts.
This exhibition is organized for the Ogunquit Museum of American Art by Assistant Curator, Theresa Choi, and is made possible with support from Boston Financial Management.
