Creative Alliance | Exhibition: Swimming Pool

Swimming Pool is a solo exhibition by Baltimore primarily based interdisciplinary artist and ultramarathon open water swimmer, Katie Pumphrey. Swimming Pool options all new work and a site-specific set up.

Deeply related to her experiences within the water, Pumphrey explores the repetition of our anxieties and fears, together with the humor we name on to swim by way of all of it. Her work explores how our creativeness performs tips on us, particularly when stress is excessive and the journey is way.

Pumphrey’s work reference the compositions of historic work by way of playful colours and pictures of swimmers and marine life. Her engagement with work like Rubens ‘ “Three Graces” and Copley’s “Watson and the Shark” as cultural references takes classical our bodies and submerges them in up to date waters of worry and anxiousness. A declaration that our deepest fears and anxieties can grow to be our most profound academics.

Echoed within the repetition of a swimmer’s fingers and the lurking suggestion of sea monsters, this name and response with historical past combines these tensions, and dives into the connectedness between human instincts and play.

Through a gap reception paired with playful performances, and artist talks that heart dialogue over monologue, in addition to group partnerships, Pumphrey creates group the place connection turns into a shared expertise, and artwork serves as a necessity.

September 5, 6-9 pm: Exhibition Opening and social gathering

September 24, 6:30-8 pm: Artist Talk and Swim Stories

TBA: Ticket Dinner

Artist Bio

Katie Pumphrey (b.1987) is an American interdisciplinary artist and ultramarathon open water swimmer. Pulling from her experiences within the water, her work, sculptures, and installations use abstraction and imagery to research our anxieties, fears, and the way our creativeness performs tips on us. Incorporating a little bit of humor, Pumphrey explores these tensions and the connectedness between human instincts and play. Pumphrey has a Bachelors of Fine Art in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her works have been exhibited in galleries throughout the United States, together with solo exhibitions in Baltimore, MD, Washington, DC, Alexandria, VA, and Key West, FL. She has participated in artist residencies on the Vermont Studio Center, Studios of Key West, Gallery Four, in addition to the Creative Alliance in Baltimore, the place she was a resident artist from 2011-2014. On June twenty fifth, 2024, Katie Pumphrey turned the primary individual to finish the “Bay to Baltimore” swim, a 24 mile swim from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

Pumphrey’s history-making Bay to Baltimore swim in assist and celebration for the decades-long clear up efforts to make the Baltimore Harbor swimmable and a protected leisure useful resource for town. Pumphrey continues to be concerned in these efforts, lately founding the nonprofit Baltimore Open Water Swimmers (BOWS), and talking on the Swimmable Cities Summit, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Pumphrey lately joined as a signatory to the Swimmable Cities Charter, and now serves as a Swimmable Cities Ambassador. Other notable swims embrace three English Channel swims (2015, 2022, 2025), in addition to across the island of Manhattan (2017) and the Catalina Channel (2018, 2024)— these three swims make up the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming. Pumphrey was the 194th individual (73rd lady) on the planet to realize that honor. Her work as an artist is deeply related to her experiences as an athlete, as is her group outreach and advocacy. Pumphrey lives and works in Baltimore City, MD.