Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, drawing, sculpture, video, collage
Website: catewhite.com
Cate White was born in 1971 and grew up in Greenwood Ridge near Boonville in rural Mendocino County, California, in a working-class community of Dust Bowl settlers. She spent her twenties near the Mendocino Coast writing before pivoting to visual art at age 30 in 2002, describing the transition as a mystical awakening in which “the visual world just came to life before me as it hadn’t since I was a very young child.” She later earned an MFA from the Arts and Consciousness program at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley (2010), having previously received a BA from Dominican University in 1994. White relocated to San Francisco and eventually settled in West Oakland in 2009, where she lived and worked for fifteen years before moving to Mendocino County in 2020. She currently splits her time between Oakland and the Mendocino Coast.
White’s public career began in 2014 with the ProArts 2x2 Solos exhibition in Oakland. She received the 2014–2015 Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts — a year-long fellowship supporting an emerging Bay Area painter — and subsequently completed a fully funded year-long residency at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation in New Mexico (2015–16). She has held visiting artist positions at the University of New Mexico and Sonoma State University, and presented work at San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She is represented by George Adams Gallery in New York.
White makes paintings in acrylic, latex, spray paint, house paint, glitter, and collage on canvas, building up surfaces through layers of poured paint, roller applications, thin washes, and additive texture materials such as pumice, mica, and gems. Her compositions center on caricatured human figures and anthropomorphized animals, often arranged in centralized groupings reminiscent of 15th-century altarpieces, though her imagery subverts any spiritual reassurance. Critics have described the work as “abrasively zany, wickedly boisterous, and more than a little bit terrifying,” locating it within a lineage that includes Philip Guston, Peter Saul, and Roy De Forest, while acknowledging the influence of outsider artists such as Martin Ramirez and Howard Finster.
White describes her studio practice as devotional — a path toward liberation rather than a career strategy. Her paintings are explicitly political without being didactic: living in West Oakland shaped her sustained focus on vulnerability, systemic oppression, and “the cyclical nature of destructive power structures like colonialism, white supremacy, the patriarchy and capitalism.” After relocating to Mendocino County, her palette shifted toward brighter, more ebullient colors, though her core aesthetic — marked by sheer panic underlying a feverish zaniness — remained consistent. She also maintains a YouTube series, How Do You Paint with Cate White, an improvisational painting show inspired by Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting.
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