Bio

Catherine McCarthy is a painter whose psychologically charged, metaphor-rich images explore memory, identity, and the emotional currents that shape life. Drawing from family photographs, art history, and personal experience, she creates layered visual narratives where the sacred and the everyday, the historical and the intimate, coexist. While earlier paintings often used recurring motifs drawn from nature and myth, her recent work turns inward, with the body becoming a site for intimate explorations of identity, memory, and emotional inheritance.

Educated at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, McCarthy emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a distinctive voice in figurative painting. Her work gained national attention through gallery and museum exhibitions across the United States, leading to major milestones in 1999 with solo museum exhibitions and acquisitions by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Her paintings are now held in numerous public and private collections, including the MFA Boston, the Rose Art Museum, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

Over the course of her career, McCarthy’s work has evolved through richly imagined series that merge autobiography with archetype. Whether reinterpreting art historical compositions or inventing symbolic protagonists, she uses the figure as a vessel for emotional truth. Periods of personal upheaval and renewal have deepened the work’s directness and urgency, reinforcing painting as both an act of witness and a means of resilience.

McCarthy is the recipient of many honors, including the Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and the Lillian Orlowsky–William Freed Award. Her work has been widely reviewed and featured in national publications, and she has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the country. Alongside her studio practice, she has taught and mentored artists at numerous institutions, extending her commitment to painting into the classroom and broader community.

Education

1976-1977
The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

1978
BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston MA