to the Hudson River School when I learned that many of the paintings were made specifically to incite a feeling of awe and a desire to experience the new frontier. This struck me as a particularly American kind of propagandist message that I wanted to reference in my paintings. I love the idea of showing ... what it might be like to experience such a place. —Will Cotton Career Will Cotton has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. He was represented by Mary Boone Gallery, New York, from 2000 until the gallery's closure in 2019. He is currently represented by Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, Colorado; Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France, and Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, Germany. His works have also been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000); the Seattle Art Museum (2002), the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (2004); the Hudson River Museum (2007); the Triennale di Milano, Italy (2007) the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris (2008), the Orlando Museum of Art, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. His work is in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, Washington, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. In 2004 he received the Princess Grace Foundation award for contemporary art in Monaco. Will Cotton was awarded an honorary Doctorate from the New York Academy of Art where he was a senior critic in 2012. Other projects Cotton installed a pop-up (model) French bakery art installation at Partners & Spade in Manhattan, New York. Confections and baked goods the artist used for visual reference were baked on site and were for sale over three weekends in November 2009. Bakery staff were fitted with custom-made tiaras of the kind Cotton paints atop the heads of many women in his paintings. Cotton was the Artistic Director for Katy Perry's 2010 music video, California Gurls, which was based on themes and imagery from his paintings. In his debut performance art work, Cockaigne for Performa 11, Cotton employed the forms of both ballet and burlesque to create a celebration of whipped cream and cotton candy. References External links Official website Corwin, William, Will Cotton Cockaigne, 2011, Brooklyn Rail, review. Living people 20th-century American painters American male painters 21st-century American painters 1965 births People from Melrose, Massachusetts Painters from Massachusetts Cooper Union alumni New York Academy of Art alumni Album-cover and concert-poster artists