Amherst, MA ("Parker's Portables”)

Amherst, MA ("Parker's Portables”)Kate Fleming is a painter and printmaker based in her hometown of Arlington, Virginia. Between 2019 and 2021 Kate traveled to and documented all 50 states alongside her partner, photographer Tom Woodruff. The small, plein air oil paintings she created on the road capture the human built American landscape: gas stations, parking lots, strip malls, and big box stores. This series of paintings won Kate third prize at the 2023 Bethesda Painting Awards.

Kate Fleming is a painter and printmaker based in her hometown of Arlington, Virginia. Between 2019 and 2021 Kate traveled to and documented all 50 states alongside her partner, photographer Tom Woodruff. The small, plein-air oil paintings she created on the road capture the human-built American landscape: gas stations, parking lots, strip malls, and big box stores. This series of paintings won Kate third prize at the 2023 Bethesda Painting Awards.
Kate has completed residencies at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Penland School of Crafts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington. Kate’s work was included in the exhibition Inside Out, Upside Down (2020) at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. She has been featured in The Washington Post, East City Art, Washington City Paper, and WJLA-ABC7.

About this collection:
From 2019 to 2021, I traveled to all 50 states, painting the human-built landscape and asking, what does my world really look like? What can I see today that I couldn’t see yesterday and won’t see tomorrow? The Grand Canyon will look the same in 50 years; what about the McDonald’s drive-throughs and Walmart parking lots? The completed body of work is a time capsule of over 200 paintings, all small enough to fit in the 8x8” wooden boxes in which I stored them. The paintings I made on the road capture America’s sprawling national aesthetic of big box stores, parking lots, and gas stations. Although I drove over 46,000 miles to paint every state, the paintings all look like Anytown, USA. Our nation is vast, complex, and divided — and yet a visual unity persists.