About the Artist

Judith Graham lived and worked in Southwestern Colorado for more than two decades, where she painted the geological forms and atmospheres that defined her relationship to place. Her work was rooted in the shapes, colors, and vast spatial rhythms of the Rio Grande River drainage and the San Juan Mountains, with particular attention to tundra landscapes above timberline.

Her paintings reflect a deep attentiveness to how one exists and moves through wild places. Embedded within the work is an ongoing inquiry into the relationship between place, perception, and connectedness—ideas closely aligned with concepts of genius loci, as articulated by thinkers such as Lucy Lippard and Yi-Fu Tuan. For Graham, the visual specificity of landscape was never an end in itself. Place functioned as both subject and metaphor, a veil through which something more universal could be sensed.

Throughout her career, Judith Graham sought a distilled visual language, using color, shape, and spatial compression to suggest what lies beyond the immediately visible. Her paintings invite quiet contemplation and are meant to be both grounding and expansive, offering viewers a sense of vastness, clarity, and uplift.

Judith Graham studied at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design in New York before earning her M.F.A. from the University of Chicago, where the broader intellectual and cultural context of visual ideas played a central role in her development. She held numerous one-person exhibitions across the United States and completed large-scale, site-specific commissions in multiple cities.

Following her passing in 2024, Judith Graham’s artistic legacy is carried forward by her daughter, Quai Barker. Quai serves as the steward of the estate, preserving and sharing her mother’s body of work in alignment with Judith’s original vision. This work continues not through Quai, but with her—honoring a lifelong devotion to place, perception, and the quiet power of landscape.

For inquiries regarding available works, exhibitions, or the Judith Graham estate, please contact Quai Barker:

Phone: 303.968.6811 •  E-mail: barkerquai@gmail.com  

Professional Highlights

  • MFA-University of Chicago
  • School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design in New York
  • One person shows in Chicago, Colorado, Wisconsin & California
  • Private collections in California, Colorado, Illinois, Arizona, Ohio, Florida & Minnesota
  • Teaching Experience, All Ages
  • Complete Curriculum Vitae (CV) available for download.

Press

Links and Resources

A Sense of Place

Geological Places

Acknowledgement of Influences

Acknowledging Vera

I would like to especially acknowledge Vera Klement, the greatest living painter in my opinion, and express my deepest gratitude for all that she has given me, one of her students at the University of Chicago.  Her role as my major professor and mentor has been profoundly and integrally important to me and I could never thank her enough.

Judith Graham, 2015