Josephine Halvorson's practice engages objects that are often overlooked and reveal traces of human activity, such as tools, writing, and fragments. Working directly from life and often in a single session, Halvorson's practice allows for a prolonged closeness and shared experience with an object. The patience of perception in her work reflects this collaboration between her, her materials and an object, in which each painting becomes a record of the artist's conversation with the world, and a material testament to the object in time.
Halvorson received her MFA from Columbia University in 2007, her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003, and attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2002. Halvorson is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Vienna, Austria (2003-4), The Tiffany Foundation Award (2009), and a NYFA Fellowship in Painting (2010). She has spent yearlong residencies in Paris as a Harriet Hale Woolley Fellow at the Fondation des États-Unis (2007-8), and in Brooklyn at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program (2009-10). Halvorson's work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She teaches painting at Princeton University and The Cooper Union, and is a Core Critic in the MFA program at Yale University. Halvorson lives and works out of Brooklyn, New York.