Claire Downes Whitehurst is a painter, printmaker, and ceramicist. She received her BFA in Painting from the University of Mississippi, a Post Baccalaureate from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and her MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa. Drawing from the landscape and atmosphere of the Deep American South, her work explores queer space, religious iconography, and botanical architecture through form, color, and composition. Her practice plays with the relationship between image and object.

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

Whitehurst has exhibited nationally and internationally and has published two books of drawings and poetry. She was shortlisted for the Hopper Prize and was recently nominated by the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Oxford American, ArtMaze Magazine, and Graphite Journal in collaboration with the Hammer Museum, among others.

She will have her first solo museum exhibition at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in 2028.
She lives and works in Philadelphia.

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