OUR ALUMNI EXCEL: Katie O’Keefe
Alumni Katie O’Keefe’s work featured in National Portrait Gallery Exhibition
Katie O’Keefe’s Entwined Repose is currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery in DC as a part of “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” Exhibition. Taína Caragol, curator of painting, sculpture and Latin art and history for the National Portrait Gallery, and Charlotte Ickes, curator of time-based media art and special projects for the Portrait Gallery, co-organized the exhibition. The seven-person jury chose 35 portraits (by 36 artists) to go on view as part of the exhibition. The selection, which was drawn from more than 3,300 entries, includes artist contributions from 14 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
Katie is a 2010 alumni of The Art Effect and graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2014 with a BFA in Fiber Arts. After volunteering at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) to help mount a Maren Hassinger exhibition, her fiber skills led to being asked to assist on another project, then more work there, and eventually a preparatorship position. It was during her time at BMA that she first heard about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from her coworkers, a discovery that reminds her of advice she got at The Art Effect, back when it was still Mill Street Loft.
“One thing that Todd Poteet said to me when I was in Senior Project, I think the best advice he ever gave me, was to make friends. I think that holds true. You’ve got to find your support network, and you’ve got to also surround yourself with people who are also interested in similar things. I’m saying that because when I was working at the BMA I was working with other art handlers who also worked at the Smithsonian and that’s where I found out about the competition. It didn’t get me through the door, but it told me about the competition. I would not have known to even search for that, I would not have known there was a museum that had a competition that anyone could apply for, let alone a competition as big as it was.” ~ Katie O’Keefe
The first-prize winner of the competition receives a cash award of $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a living person for the museum’s permanent collection. Additional prizes in the amounts of $10,000 and $7,500 will be awarded to second- and third-place winners, respectively, for the 2025 competition. Past prize-winners whose commissioned portraits now reside in the museum’s collection include 2006 winner David Lenz (sitter Eunice Kennedy Shriver); 2009 winner Dave Woody (sitter Alice Waters); 2013 winner Bo Gehring (sitter Esperanza Spalding); 2016 winner Amy Sherald (sitter former First Lady Michelle Obama); and 2019 winner Hugo Crosthwaite (sitter Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.). From the exhibition’s opening through April 5th, visitors—in person and online—can vote for their favorite artwork to receive the People’s Choice Award.
The exhibition was originally slated to be up from May 3, 2025, through March 1, 2026, but experienced a delay due to anticipation of the impact of the government shutdown and funding lapse. The show opened this January on Saturday, January 24th and will run through August 30, 2026.
