Interdisciplinary artist and ultramarathon open water swimmer Katie Pumphrey ’09 (Painting BFA) is featured in the August 2025 issue of Baltimore Magazine. The feature dives into her third completed swim of the English Channel, her advocacy for clean water in Baltimore and globally, and her upcoming solo exhibition at the Creative Alliance.
Read in excerpt from the article below, and the full story at the Baltimore Magazine website.
When not training or coaching other endurance swimmers—she had several mentees with her for the Great Chesapeake Bay Swim in June—Pumphrey is a Maryland Institute College of Art-trained visual artist, whose work has been widely exhibited. Both her large-scale canvases and more whimsical sculptures are deeply connected to her open water experiences. Her typical palette, not surprisingly, includes swaths and shades of blue. Her blending of abstract and figurative images often intertwines personal and environmental themes.
More recently, she has incorporated historical references. In fact, an upcoming solo exhibition at the Creative Alliance titled “Swimming Pool” features two new works based on famous water-themed paintings. One is a massive reworking of the 1851 “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by German painter Emanuel Leutze, and the second is a re-imagining of “Watson and the Shark,” a 1778 oil painting by Anglo-American artist John Singleton Copley, which depicts the rescue of a teenage boy off the coast of Cuba after a shark had bitten off half of his leg. (Ironically, while Pumphrey can get anxious about predators during swims, Jaws is also a favorite movie.)
Last year, however, she added another dimension to her CV. Highlighting the Waterfront Partnership’s decades-long campaign to restore Baltimore’s post-industrial harbor, Pumphrey conceived a first-of-its-kind, 24-mile swim from the Bay Bridge into the city. Since that effort—nothing short of heroic, but also visionary—Pumphrey has become a leading figure in the ongoing push for a swimmable, fishable harbor, including joining last summer’s “Harbor Splash,” a buzzed-about public swim that was scheduled to be repeated this summer, but was ultimately cancelled due to weather. In late June this year, Pumphrey keynoted the first-ever Swimmable Cities conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
