Katherine Bernhardt: Why is a mushroom growing in my shower?

Katherine Bernhardt (b. 1975) was born in St. Louis, Missouri and received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2000. In 2018, the solo exhibition Katherine Bernhardt: Watermelon World was on view at the Mario Testino Museum (MATE) in Lima, Peru. The previous year, in 2017, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas presented FOCUS: Katherine Bernhardt. Also in 2017, the artist painted a 60 foot-long mural entitled XXL Superflat Pancake for the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum. Her work has also been included in significant group exhibitions, such as We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz, Jewish Museum, New York (2020), and NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Museum, Miami, which traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2015-2017). A Los Angeles–based art historian and critic, Suzanne Hudson is professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California. A longtime contributor to Artforum, she is the author of books including Robert Ryman: Used Paint (2009), Agnes Martin: Night Sea (2017), and Contemporary Painting (2021). Supported by a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she is pursuing research into the practical applications of art making for Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of process within American modernism.