Described by art critic Roberta Smith as a painter working between flatness and illusion, Josephine Halverson sets out to use painting (as well as sculpture and printmaking) to observe the world around her and communicate the experience of seeing and learning from our environment. “The best-case scenario is when I’m painting, it feels as if I’m feeling that object through the brushstroke, or I’m reimagining what it means to be that object, in paint, so a lot of what I’m after is this correspondence between the object and the paint mediated through me.”

Halverson grew up in Brewster, MA on Cape Cod with artist parents who ran a metal shop. As a child, she’d make things out of sheet copper or steel. She’d always been drawn to art, but she also wanted to study history or mathematics. Getting into Cooper, she said, made art seem like a viable choice. Her formative experiences at Cooper included a graphic design class she took with Philippe Apeloig and a 4-class seminar taught by another Cooper art graduate, the renowned painter Alex Katz. His course, which didn’t focus on his own work, was instead about introducing students to the ways the art world works, the different missions of major museums, and as she put it, “In other words, once those institutional contexts become more transparent you can be more clear about the intention of your work.” Katz also pointed out that his own work went in and out of fashion, which encouraged Halverson to take a long-term view of her practice. “Seeing Alex in the flesh and being able to identify with him, since he’d gone to Cooper Union as well, helped me to realize the possibility of a dedicated path, so it was very inspiring for me in that sense.”

Granted a Fulbright in 2003, she spent the year painting in Vienna. “That year opened up the question of how to make a painting relate to a place. This of course has become the bedrock of my current practice, now looking back.”  She earned her MFA at Columbia in 2007.

Although she was originally a studio painter, she now works in situ, packing up her art supplies and driving to the site of subjects that attract her. In part, this came about because she discovered that objects she found serendipitously let her be freer in her approach to painting. 

In 2021, Halverson, who is an art professor and chair of the MFA Program in Painting at Boston University College of Fine Arts, was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship. Previously, she’d won the Harriet Hale Woolley Award at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, France and was the first American pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici. She’s taught courses at Cooper, among many other schools, and her work has been shown internationally at museums such as the ICA Boston and has been the subject of a solo exhibition of site-responsive work at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM, where she was the Museum’s first artist in residence. In 2024 she presented a solo exhibition at James Fuentes, Los Angeles.