Josephine Halvorson grew up on Cape Cod, where she first studied art on the beaches of Provincetown and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003, she attended Yale Norfolk in 2002, and got her MFA from Columbia University in 2007. Josephine has been awarded a number of prestigious residencies including a Fulbright Fellowship to Austria, a Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarhip at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, Moly-Sabata in Sablons, France, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. She was also the first American to receive the Rome Prize at the French Academy at the Villa Medici, Rome, Italy.
Halvorson’s work has been exhibited widely. 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. In 2016 she exhibited large-scale painted sculptures at Storm King Art Center, as part of the “Outlooks” series curated by Nora Lawrence. 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.
Josephine Halvorson has taught at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville Columbia University, and Yale University. In 2016 Halvorson joined Boston University as Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting. She lives and works in Western Massachusetts.
Brian met Josephine at the site of her solo show at Sikemma Jenkins and they spoke about her youth in Cape Cod, hip hop and grunge, painting in plein air and much more.