The Artist
Biography
Catherine Conrad is an emerging conceptual artist based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, specializing in painting, mixed media, and sculptural installation.
In 1988, she graduated with a BFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design, before adventuring up to Alaska with her husband. After diagnoses of autoimmune diseases, she moved back to South Carolina. Although affected by chronic illness, she started the next stage of her life as a homemaker and a mother.
Having only resumed her art career during the throes of covid-19, she uses her art to explore the concepts of journeys, illness, nature, and faith. She was awarded the South Carolina Art Commission's Emerging Artist grant in 2024. She is a member of the National Association for Women Artists (NAWA), NAWA’s South Carolina chapter, and the Artists' Guild of Spartanburg.
Catherine’s works have been featured in shows at the Piccolo Spoleto Juried Art Exhibition, Southworks National Juried Art Exhibition, the Rocky Mount National Juried Art Show, the Macon Arts Gallery, the Franklin G. Burroughs–Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum, and the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, among others. She has also had solo and group shows at the Spartanburg Community College, the Black Creek Community Arts Council, and the Artists' Guild of Spartanburg.
Artist's Statement
Throughout my life, art has been a way that I explore thoughts, ideas, and emotions. A constant form that exists in nearly all my art is an organic shape that I identify with as hope and possibility. I am drawn to this shape in nature and in the human body, as I deal with chronic illness which I have come to recognize as my strength rather than my weakness: hollowed tree, nest, fruit, oyster, seed, egg, womb, and cell.
