Cowboy Take Me Away

Cowboy Take Me Away​ by Catherine Graffam reimagines the artist’s past through expressive self portraits, unearthing the experiences of growing up queer in rural Maine and reflecting on the affects of her upbringing. The pressures to conform by both family and society to meet the binary standards of sex and gender remain a life-long source of trauma for transgender and intersex people. Being both intersex and a transgender woman, Graffam felt she continuously failed to rise to the expectations of boyhood and reflects on that tension through painterly abstraction and color associations.

Catherine Graffam is an artist and educator based in Boston. She received her BFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2015, and since has shown work internationally both in museums and galleries. She was named one of 2017’s “Remarkable Women” by NH Magazine, which is pretty cool. Most recently, she was profiled in The Jealous Curator’s new book A Big Important Art Book (Now With Women!), interviewed in TIME magazine on transgender issues, and had her work accepted into the permanent collection of the Library of Congress.

Currently, she manages exhibitions at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA and is a faculty member within the Art & Design department at Lasell University. She is an InterACT Youth Member as well as a member of the Boston LGBT+ Artist Alliance.