Kate Shepherd

“Shepherd dug deep into herself and her process to figure out how to make paintings that would essentially make themselves instead of her superimposing images on them. Having always considered the crisp lines describing geometric structures and spatial experiences to be what her painting was about, she was compelled to finally address the qualities of her painted surfaces without sacrificing the personal criteria she holds for making a successful painting, in particular the articulation of space and the concomitant viewer experience.” —Susan Harris, “Kate Shepherd: Surveillance,” Brooklyn Rail, May 2020

Kate Shepherd is a New York-based artist known for rigorous works that explore and complicate abstracted space, using rich color and manipulated surfaces that absorb and reflect their environments. For Tuesday Evenings, Shepherd shares the trajectory of her practice in a presentation she calls “A Progression in my Work, logical and radical.” Art writer and curator Susan Harris reflects on Shepherd’s early work in her Brooklyn Rail review of the artist’s exhibition, Surveillance, at Galerie Lelong & Co. in 2020: “I first visited Shepherd’s studio in the mid-late ’90s when she was making quirky drawings on prefabricated paint chips. I wrote about her work for a catalogue accompanying a 2007 gallery show in which I was infatuated by the element of drawing in her paintings that was conceptually, psychologically, and programmatically fundamental to her art making. Her unique union of drawing and painting, her adherence to the laws of linear perspective, and the subdued shifts in tone and luminosity that create hypothetical, architectural spaces into which viewers are pulled have been signature ingredients in an oeuvre that never feels prosaic or formulaic.” Shepherd will take it from there, speaking about her most recent works as well as what is on the horizon.

Kate Shepherd was born in 1961 in New York City, where she currently lives and works. Her works are in many collections including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Menil Collection, Houston; Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Throughout her career, Shepherd has explored perspectival and abstracted spaces in her richly colored surfaces. As well as having a rigorous painting practice, Shepherd has a long-standing commitment to printmaking. She has self-published, and made editions with and for Chinati Foundation, Dieu Donné, Lower East Side Printshop, Pace Prints, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is represented by Anthony Meier Fine Arts, Mill Valley, California; Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris and New York; Josh Pazda Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston; and Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston.

This popular series of lectures and presentations by artists, architects, historians, and critics is free and open to the public. Lectures begin at 6 pm in the Modern’s auditorium. Seating is at 5:30 pm. 

A limited number of tickets (limit two per person) will be available for purchase online ($5) from 10 am until 3 pm the day of the lecture. Free admission tickets (limit two per person) are available at the Modern’s information desk beginning at 4 pm on the day of the lecture. 

On Tuesday nights during the lecture series, the galleries, Café Modern, and the Modern Shop are open until 6 pm.