About the work

I made several paintings, including these, during the pandemic in my local general store in western Massachusetts. I set up in the back storage room so I wouldn’t breathe in the virus and painted what I found around me.

Through the open door I could see customers buy potato chips or sodas or pick up the day’s newspaper. The store was run by Dave Herrick who greeted every single person with kindness and respect. It was jarring and uplifting in such a divisive time. Dave has since retired and sold it to a young farmer named Peter. Now the store stocks local produce and has a fresh coat of paint and an Instagram account.

Norman Rockwell lived nearby and Dave’s father modeled for him. I mention this because the general store had shades of the same regional Americana that populated Rockwell’s paintings. For instance, the open shelves were stocked with packaged dry goods carrying the same brand names as decades before. The flag that hung at the back of the store recalled the one shoved behind the tired clerk in Rockwell’s Marriage License, a portrait of hope and disappointment in equal measure.

-Josephine Halvorson, March 31st 2022

About the artist

JOSEPHINE HALVORSON (b. 1981) grew up on Cape Cod, where she first studied art on the beaches of Provincetown and with Barnet Rubenstein at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She attended The Cooper Union School of Art (BFA, 2003), Yale Norfolk (2002), and continued her interdisciplinary education at Columbia University’s School of the Arts (MFA, 2007). Halvorson has been awarded a number of prestigious residencies including a Fulbright Fellowship to Austria (2003-4); a Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship at the Fondation des États-Unis, Paris (2007-8); Moly-Sabata in Sablons, France (2014, 2017); and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida (2016). She was the first American to receive the Rome Prize at the French Academy at the Villa Medici, Rome, Italy (2014-2015), and the first Artist-in-Residence at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (2019). In 2021, Halvorson was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship under the Fine Arts Category. 
Halvorson’s work has been exhibited widely. In 2015 she presented her first museum survey exhibition, Slow Burn, at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, curated by Cora Fisher. In 2016 she exhibited large-scale painted sculptures at Storm King Art Center, as part of the Outlooks series curated by Nora Lawrence. From October 2021 to March 2022, Halvorson’s work was exhibited at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum as part of the museum’s Contemporary Voices Program, featuring works she made during her residency. 
Her work has been written about extensively in various publications and she is one of the subjects of Art21's documentary series, New York Close Up.
Josephine Halvorson has taught at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville Columbia University, and Yale University. In 2016 Halvorson joined Boston University as Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting. She lives and works in Western Massachusetts.