Claire Whitehurst

About the Artist

Claire Whitehurst is a painter, printmaker and ceramicist living and working in Mississippi. She received her BFA from the University of Mississippi and her MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa. She draws from the landscape and atmosphere of the deep South, exploring queer space, memory and time through color, form, surface and composition. Her work plays with the boundaries of form and the relationships between image and object.

In 2018, she was the recipient of the Stanley Fellowship for International Research at the University of Iowa. She lived and worked in the Dordogne region of southern France where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and engravings. Her research focused on the relationship between surface and image, and the compositional complexities of abstract narrative.

She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and a book of her drawings and writing was published in 2021 through Drum Machine Editions in Asheville, North Carolina. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including New American Paintings, Oxford American, ArtMaze Magazine, and the Graphite Journal in collaboration with the Hammer Museum. She has had solo exhibitions in New Orleans, Louisiana, Iowa City, Iowa, Oxford, Mississippi and Los Angeles, California.