About
Catherine Boyd is Professor of Visual Arts at Alderson Broaddus, Director of the Pickett Gallery (the AB campus exhibition space), and the senior studio-art faculty member. A painter whose work is held in private and institutional collections across the Southeast, she has had twenty solo exhibitions since her MFA — most recently "Hillside Pigment" at the Tamarack Center in Beckley, WV (2025).
Boyd holds an M.F.A. in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2002) and a B.F.A. (summa cum laude) from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA, 1999). She joined the AB faculty in 2009 after seven years of teaching at Auburn University and at the Penland School of Crafts, and was promoted to full Professor in 2018.
At AB she teaches the entire painting and drawing studio sequence, directs the senior visual-arts thesis course, runs the Pickett Gallery exhibition program (six exhibitions per year), and leads the AB summer Painting Intensive — a four-week pigment-making and plein-air program in the Allegheny Highlands.
Education
- 2002M.F.A., Painting — Cranbrook Academy of Art.
- 1999B.F.A., Painting (summa cum laude) — Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Teaching
Professor Boyd teaches across the painting and drawing studio sequence and directs the senior thesis course. The introductory drawing studio (ART 105) is consistently among the most over-subscribed Hilltop Core electives at AB.
- ART 105Introduction to DrawingA foundational studio course meeting twice per week for three hours per session. Open to all students. The largest gateway course in the AB visual-arts program.
- ART 215 / 315Painting I & IIA two-semester intermediate studio sequence in oil and acrylic painting, including a section on traditional handmade pigments using earth, mineral, and plant sources.
- ART 490Senior Visual Arts ThesisA year-long capstone in which each visual-arts senior produces a coherent body of 8–12 finished works, culminating in a public exhibition and a written artist statement.
Studio Practice & Exhibition Record
Boyd's current studio practice — the "Hillside Pigment" series, ongoing since 2019 — is built entirely on handmade earth pigments dug, processed, and bound from West Virginia hillsides within twenty miles of College Hill. Each painting is the same landscape, painted with the same pigments dug from the soil that the painting depicts.
Her work has been exhibited at the Tamarack Center (Beckley, WV), the Huntington Museum of Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Hunter Museum of American Art (Chattanooga), and at private galleries in New York, Atlanta, Asheville, and Charleston. She is represented by Gallery 1971 in Asheville, NC.
Selected Publications & Presentations
- 2025Solo exhibition, "Hillside Pigment," Tamarack Center, Beckley, WV.
- 2024Solo exhibition, "The Color of Where We Are," Gallery 1971, Asheville.
- 2023Featured artist, Painters of the Appalachian Renaissance, exhibition catalog, Hunter Museum.
- 2022Solo exhibition, "Earth & Binder," Huntington Museum of Art.
- 2020NEA Independent Artist Fellowship.
Honors & Service
- 2024WV Governor's Arts Award, Individual Artist.
- 2020National Endowment for the Arts Independent Artist Fellowship.
- 2018Promoted to Professor of Visual Arts.
- 2015Cranbrook Academy of Art Distinguished Alumni Award.
- 2002Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship.
You can't paint a hillside in oil paint that you bought at Michaels. You can. But you shouldn't pretend the hillside is a real subject of your painting. The painting will know.— Catherine M. Boyd, MFA
Beyond the Classroom
Boyd lives outside Philippi on a 19-acre farm with her partner Sam (a forester) and three dogs. She has run the AB student volunteer pigment-dig at her property every fall since 2018 — a Saturday tradition that has become locally famous.
She is a serious amateur cellist (she plays in the Mountainaires Chamber Orchestra of Buckhannon), a competitive vegetable gardener, and a longtime volunteer at the Barbour County Animal Shelter.