PRESS

Cate White came to the Bay to connect—through her art, she’s done just that.

Mary Corbin / 48hills / January 7, 2021
“Though her work appears loose, White would like people to know that it’s not easy, fun, and free, even though it might appear that way. She wants to clarify that, ‘the apparent freedom is the product of meeting the demons of fear, over-control, and doubt and winning for just seconds at a time.’”

Cate White // Studio Visit

Elise Morris / The Studio Work / February 20, 2020
"In my own life, I suffer a lot if I start trying to close myself off to things—feelings, ideas, people, perceptions. All I really care about is staying open to the life force and everything that rides in on it. My task is to just note everything coming through, which includes all kinds of opposing forces and conflicting ideas. This process of staying open results in artwork that contains all of these seeming opposites... So it’s not so much interest that makes me deal in paradox. Or rather, it’s just interest in staying connected to life.”

Cate White Exposes Her Truth

Maria Porges / Visual Art Source / September 13, 2019
“These paintings represent the artist's ability to see the extraordinary magic in every moment of life, coupled with a desire to paint all of it. Despite their beauty, they made me sad — reminding me, as they do, of how hard we have to work to prevent a vast, no holds barred manipulation of our emotions and desires, our beliefs and fears. When it is all but impossible to find the truth anywhere else, it's art's job to keep exposing it. There are a lot of ways to do that, and White's work is surely one of them.”

The Tears of Cate White

John Rapko / Return to Darkness / September 10, 2019
“Consider the painter Cate White’s recent show at the Mills College Art Museum. A few dozen works are exhibited, mostly paintings, but also drawings, sculptures, a room of videos of her podcasts, and some unclassifiable constructions. One way to gain a sense of White’s extraordinary artistic achievement is to consider how the poetics exhibited here could not be well captured in the stereotypical model of an artist’s statement. A different poetics…would…begin by asking questions like: What aspects of life are left out of the dominant culture? What questions are taboo, and may not be asked on pain of exclusion?”

Cate White @ Mills

Derek Conrad Murray and Soraya Murray / SquareCylinder.com / August 7, 2019
“African-Americans did not create anti-black racism in the U.S., and therefore, it is not exclusively their problem to solve. White Americans must discuss it openly and honestly and without phony sentiment and political correctness. The notion that painting the black body is off-limits to white artists (or any artist for that matter) is both bullying and deeply disturbing. These representations must be undertaken, but they also need to be handled responsibly, and with care and respect. The conversation engendered by White's images is a much-needed one, even if it ignites sensitivities in some viewers.”

YBCA’s Bay Area Now 8 Is Unafraid of the Intersection of Race and Class

Jonathan Curiel / SF Weekly / January 10, 2019
"Cate White paints scenes of people she knows. Full of fantastical imagery and colors and a pathos reminiscent of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s greatest work, the paintings have made their way into the upper echelons of the art world and pop culture.”

Cate White’s Keys to the City

John Rapko / Return to Darkness / December 30, 2018
“…one of the Bay Area’s possibly greatest and surely most interesting artists, the painter Cate White, has attempted a demonstration piece, one summarizing her artistic practice as a piece of her life, and closely modeled upon Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda (1634-45). The resultant Keys to the City (2016), currently on display at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is the most richly engaging work of visual art I’ve seen from a Bay Area artist in the past decade.”

Bay Area Now 8 Surveys New Art at YBCA

Charles Desmarais SF Chronicle / August 29, 2018
“Cate White’s paintings are full of confident ambition, free association and historical allusion.”

On the Ground: San Francisco

Glen Helfand / ARTFORUM /December 2018
Image reproduction: “Keys to the City”

Expansive, Exciting 'Bay Area Now 8' Lives Up to Its Name at YBCA

Sarah Hotchkiss / KQED.org / September 7, 2018
“Less lighthearted but equally “now” are paintings by Cate White, which directly address power disparities (and how those manifest across race, gender, class and even our own interpretations of her work).”

Cate White: Countering the Cultural Trance of Normal

Austin McManus / Juxtapoz Magazine / July 2017
“Charismatic, deeply introspective and welcoming, Cate possesses those qualities we value in those in our lives.”

Critics Page: Response to James Cooper

Mark Van Proyen / Brooklyn Rail / June 2017
“White’s work does something similar with Daumier’s most overtly satirical works, adding additional dollops of pathos, panic, and self-deprecating humor.”

Figuratively Speaking: Cate White Says Hello

Kyler Ernst / Medium.com / June 2017
“The worlds depicted in White’s work represent a particular cross-section of America, juxtaposing backwoods hippie utopias, marginalized urban communities, and lower class households with tongue-in-cheek references to empire and the romanticized American West.”

The Keys to the City

Diane Armitage / THE Magazine / Dec 2015/Jan 16
“It seems that there is nothing that White won’t investigate and bring to the expressive surfaces of her work: sex, gender issues, literary references, crosscultural struggles, interracial love, and the history of art. And then there is the energy of her textual zingers that she embeds on the picture plane, zapping the viewers like a vaccination—both infecting them with new perspectives in seeing and helping to cure them of preconceived cultural notions about what is acceptable to bring to the table for consideration.”

Cate White: An Outsider No Longer

Jennifer Zack/ San Francisco Chronicle / October 2015 
“The rawness and simplicity of her work — outlined figures, glitter spray paint, provocative text (“Everybody wants to be a gansta except a gansta,” for example) — evoke both Philip Guston’s cartoonlike figures and the skin-in-the-game vitality of some passionate street art.”

(Mis)Fits: The Narrative Disobedience of Cate White’s Both on Earth: A Poet’s Report

Arisa White / Headlands Center for the Arts Tournesol Exhibition / October 2015
“White paints misfits, the intersectionality of experiences and identities that agitate the narratives that divide us into race, sex, gender, class, etc. ...Where you choose to locate yourself in any narrative, and in relationship to White’s work, is based on your degree of fearlessness.”

Art of Encounter

John Rapko / ProArts 2x2 Solos Exhibition Catalog / 2014
“We live under a broken promise of Western rationalism, wherein the acceptance of the ideal of a rational life delivered progressively through technology, science, and the liberal state has turned into a world of impoverished spontaneity, eroticism, and sociality. Most of our lives, in their workaday tedium and their administered fantasies, are rationalized, bureaucratized, compartmentalized, commodified. White’s work asks: how does one live in the emphatic sense, really live, under such conditions?”