Kate Pincus-Whitney (b.1993; USA) received her BA focused on psychology, cross cultural anthropology, and the creative arts the from Sarah Lawrence College in 2016. She received her MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, 2020.
Just as a Coca-Cola bottle in Tom Wesselmann’s Still life series is understood not simply as a coca cola bottle, but instead an icon of American identity or as in Morandi, a custard cup is not simply a cup- it is holding space as Madonna and Child, Kate Pincus-Whitney’s maximalist, feminist, and unapologetically boisterous work is not only about the reality of the still life or the things painted but about the specificity of life and its cosmology. Mapping the movement of culture through histories of spices, wax candles, or fine white china bowls, her tablescapes are a place of narrative portraiture–sometimes a sort of shrine, sometimes a stage or a commons. Sometimes they are a place for formal or historical political acts of agency, and sometimes, she simply wishes to capture the essence of a person through the objects they consume or surround themselves with. Exploring the duality of the sacred and profane the still life is the stage for it all.
Raised in the kitchen by a single mother and grandmother, her experience of identity is deeply entrenched in the sharing of the meals and the theater of the dinner table. We all must eat. Investigating modern and historical modes of consumption, food acts as both symbols and icons of psychological hunger – hunger for connection, meaning, belonging and celebrating the divine comedy of the dinner table.
Her works have been shown globally at GNYP Gallery, Antwerp; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art and Museo De La Emigration Gallega en la Argentina, Buenos Aires. Group shows include Anat Ebgi, Taipei and New York; Sow and Tailor, Hong Kong and Los Angeles; lbf Contemporary and Taylor Grahne’s Noho Studios, London; Am/ PM, London; Anat Egbi, Los Angeles; Pit, Palms Springs and Los Angles and Blum and Poe, Los Angeles.
Forbes 30 under 30 class of 2022, Kate is a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend Yale Norfolk in 2015, Visual Arts Grant to attend the Vermont Studio Center Residency, Rhode Island School of Design fellow, and recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant 2020. Pincus-Whitney also received the Presidential Scholarship to attend Sarah Lawrence College. She has given artist talks at The Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, TN, Brown University, and the American University in Dubai- UAE. In addition, her work as been critically acclaimed and featured by Art in America, Art News, Hyperallergic, Juxtaposed and Art of Choice, and Vogue among other publications.
Kate Pincus-Whitney lives and works in Los Angeles.
