Katherine Bernhardt was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1975. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2000. Her work attracts the eye like painted wallpaper, with rhythmic patterns that mimic those found in Moroccan rugs and African textiles. These works are often referred to as “pattern” paintings, as the motifs she illustrates are repeated within a single work. Her paintings combine such iconography as Windex, Pac-Man heads, and Rubik’s Cubes on single, flat picture planes alongside toucans, toilet paper, and watermelon. Bernhardt’s compositions contain a vibrant color palette, an idiosyncratic personal and political symbology. In 2015, her mural for the Venus over Manhattan Gallery in Los Angeles, Fruit Salad, is an amalgamation of her Puerto Rico-inspired colors, rhythmical patterns and structural rigor. Painting with brush or spray can, Bernhardt reinvigorates street-art actions such as “bombing” and “tagging,” collapsing distinctions between the art inside and outside the museum walls. Her exhibition experience includes: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX (2017), Canada in New York (2020), Carl Freeman Gallery in the United Kingdom (2020), etc.; her artworks have been selected by Carnegie Museum, High Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Rubell Collection, Portland Museum of Art, San Antonio Museum of Art and other public institutions.