“Three Questions”

Catherine Haggarty
November 21, 2025

Volume 2
Issue 15

Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?

Catherine Haggarty: I appreciate that painting requires my senses to be alert and reactionary in real time. I like that painting is a call and response and that painting is reliable but flexible. I love that painting keeps my brain busy outside the studio, I’m always dreaming of it. I like that painting provides possibilities and collaborations with the past, present and even potentially the future. I like that painting is a forever language.

GB: Your paintings often intertwine the natural logic of wood grain with the deliberate act of folding—one a pattern grown slowly over time, the other a gesture of sudden interruption. How do you see these two rhythms—organic continuity and abrupt crease—speaking to one another in your work?

CH: I think of all of my work as a collage of forms. I am not terribly interested in everything making sense but these colliding patterns and forms are speaking to each other for sure, that is the joy of painting. I don't know their conversation's conclusion, but I am interested in their echo.

GB: If painting is a “forever language,” with you in, out, and beyond the studio, open and echoing, what do you hope your voice in it will carry forward?

CH: I suppose thinking that my voice could be carried forward at all would be humbling and rewarding. Cultivating a voice takes time and courage and if the paintings and drawings reflect that - then I’ve done something. How it is carried forward or if it is - isn’t always something an artist can discern or organize; but being a part of a long and nuanced history of artists is certainly something to hope for.

What a gift all of it is.

Catherine Haggarty, b. 1984, is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York.

Haggarty’s paintings and curatorial work have been reviewed by and featured in Bomb Magazine, Artnet, Hyperallergic, Art Forum, Two Coats of Paint, Brooklyn Magazine, The New York Times, Art Maaze Magazine, Art Spiel, Pep Talks for Artists, Sound and Vision Podcast and The Observer.

Catherine has been a visiting artist & critic at Cornell MFA (2024), Rocky Mountain College of Art (2024), Western Connecticut MFA (2023), Contemporary Arts Memphis (2023), Vassar College (2023), Rutgers MFA (2022), U Albany MFA (2022), MICA (2022), UCONN MFA (2022 + 2023), RISD BFA (2022), Pratt BFA (2022), The University of Oregon (2021), Boston University MFA (2021), SUNY Purchase MFA (2020), Hunter MFA (2020), Denison University (2020), Brooklyn College MFA (2019) and in 2018 Haggarty was the Anderson Endowed Lecturer at Penn State University.

Solo & Two Person exhibitions include: Deanna Evans (NYC), Untitled Miami, Lorin Gallery, LA, Geary Contemporary (NYC), Massey Klein Gallery (NYC), This Friday Next Friday (Brooklyn), Bloomsburg University (PA), and Look and Listen in Marseille France. Select group exhibitions include: The PIT (LA), Badr El Jundi (Madrid, Spain), Mindy Solomon (Miami, FL), Andrew Rafcaz (Chicago, IL), Hesse Flatow (NYC), Mrs (Maspeth, NY) and McBride Contemporary in Montreal, Canada.

Haggarty earned her M.F.A from Mason Gross, Rutgers University in 2011. Haggarty is the Founder, Owner and Executive Director of The Canopy Program which is a one year mentorship program within the NYC Crit Club which Haggarty co-founded in 2017. In addition, Haggarty is a Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute.

Haggarty was the Spring 2024 Teiger Mentor for the Arts at Cornell AAP MFA and in the Winter of 2024 was recently was a Visiting Artist at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (Denver, CO) on the occasion of her Solo Exhibition ‘Stay the course’ featuring ten years of work at The Philip J. Steele Gallery.

The artist in her studio.

Mystic Time, 2024
Acrylic and water color on canvas

Keys I, 2024
Acrylic and watercolor on canvas

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Vol 2. (June 2025—?)
Vol 1. (May 2024—March 2025)

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