Episode 195: What It Means to Paint a Life — with Katherine Bradford

How can abstraction carry emotion, identity, and lived experience?

In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with painter Katherine Bradford, whose luminous work bridges the personal, mythic, and communal. Bradford moved from Maine to New York in the 1980s as a single mother raising school-age twins and became part of the first wave of artists to shape the Williamsburg art community. After more than a decade navigating the Manhattan gallery world, her work has since been recognized internationally and is held in major museum collections.

Their conversation spans Bradford’s five-decade painting career, abstraction and figuration, color and process, studio practice, and the challenge of representing human emotion. They also discuss community, motherhood, the evolving art world, and why creativity remains fundamental to how we understand ourselves and one another.

This is a conversation about painting as a lifelong practice—and art as a deeply human act.