Known for her insights into human character, the quality of light in her work, and her painting technique, Kate Gridley maintains a studio in Middlebury, Vermont, where she has lived and painted full time since 1991.
Awarded a Hutchinson Memorial Fellowship for painting on graduation from Williams College, Gridley pursued studies in New York City before moving to Florence, Italy for a year and a half of full-time study of renaissance painting techniques. She began exhibiting regularly in New York and New England, starting in 1983. Her work is in numerous public and private collections. Gridley has received underwriting and support multiple times from the Vermont Arts Council, The Vermont Community Foundation and The Vermont Studio Center; as well as the Growald Family Fund and numerous private donors.
Gridley’s installation “Passing Through: Portraits of Emerging Adults”, a set of 17 over life-size oil portraits paired with sound portraits (recorded by former NPR correspondent Anne Garrels) continues to travel across the United States after its launch in 2014. It is available for loan.
Gridley is currently at work on two installations: a multi media portrait of musician and famed children’s television character Officer Clemmons entitled “The Shoulders on Which We Stand: a Portrait of Francois Clemmons,” partially underwritten by the Vermont Arts Council and The Vermont Community Foundation; and “Witness Marks: Anatomy of a Memory,” a multi media installation in which she explores how we make memories, how we store them, and how we retrieve them.
Gridley’s paintings are in the collections of the Vermont State House, The New Hampshire State House, The Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington, DC, Quantum Chemical Corporation, The Vermont Law School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Middlebury College Museum of Art, Norwich University, Green Mountain College, Middlebury College, The Keewayden Corporation and private collections in Europe and across the United States. Her illustrations have appeared in a number of books, including Space Between, The Cook and the Gardener, Art and the Gardener, Mission Rejected: Us Soldiers who say no to Iraq, and national magazines.
Gridley’s work is represented by the Edgewater Gallery, in both their Middlebury, VT and Boston, MA venues; and Francesca Anderson Fine Art, Lexington, MA. You can visit her studio at Old Crab Rise, by appointment at: kmgridley@gmail.com