Holly Trostle Brigham

Brigham began exploring the self-portrait intensively as an M.F.A. student, starting by reclaiming the female nude from centuries of passive poses dominated by the male gaze. She portrays the nude woman as strong, self-possessed, and even godly, as many of her subjects come from mythology: “Inspired by Flack’s use of mythology, her concept of reclaiming the matriarchy and the way in which Flack talked about how women artists could approach the female nude without objectifying it since subject and object were one and the same, Brigham began a series of watercolors for which she, herself, posed as the nude model.”

The tremendous level of detail and iconography in her work invites the viewer to read her paintings as biography and autobiography intertwined: Brigham’s body performs the life of an historical figure while in turn, the choice and iconography of the figure reveal the events and concerns of Brigham’s own life, creating a “conflation of her self-image with their identities”. Brigham has stated that she often thinks of her work as “art history in reverse”: she began her education decoding the symbols and signifiers in the artwork of others, and now as an artist, she is encoding the emblems of her subjects.

Many of her paintings, such as Judith and Flora (2003) and Maria Sibylla Merian: Metamorphosis (2010), are intricate watercolors in “a muscular style with emphatic lights and darks reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s work of Alfred Leslie”; but as in Zephyr, Angel, Wings and Me (2002), Brigham also uses oil paint. More recently, she has begun using found objects and sculpted relics to develop her themes in three dimensions, as in Hildegard’s Box (2013).

Born and raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Brigham studied art history and Italian at Smith College, and continued graduate work in art history at the University of Pittsburgh. Brigham then worked as an exhibition coordinator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1990. Enrolling in the Certificate program, she studied with artists Lou Sloan, Liz Osborne, and Dan Miller, and went on to earn her M.F.A. in painting from George Washington University. At GWU, she worked closely with the artists Arthur Hall Smith and Doug Teller, and with visiting artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Rivers, and Audrey Flack, who has said that “Holly Trostle Brigham is one of the most interesting young painters working today. She is pushing the depiction of the female figure into interesting new territory”.

Holly Trostle Brigham (born 1965) is an American figurative painter whose feminist self-portraiture focuses on female subjects drawn from mythology and history. Brigham is a member of Corpus VI, a collective of figurative women artists.