CAT ALDEN Cat Alden was born in Los Angeles and received her MFA from Alfred University, NY.
Before moving to Sonoma County, Cat spent twenty-five years in a live/work space in the industrial section of Berkeley. There, surrounded by ink plants, steel foundries, and machine shops, she created dozens of public art commissions—large scale ceramic and mosaic murals for restaurants, hospitals, and public buildings.
To create her mixed media works, Cat focuses on everyday objects—common steel plate, discarded work gloves worn to exhaustion by their former owners, old shovels, gasoline cans, extension cords, tree branches—transforming them into sculptures that are as powerful as they are unexpected. During her career, Cat has shown her work in individual and group shows throughout the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York.
In 1997, The New Yorker magazine featured Cat’s sculpture, “Bad Boys”, in their “Crime and Punishment” issue. The piece was exhibited in a group show titled “Murder” at Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica. The show then traveled to venues in Miami and New York City. Additional exhibitors were the artists Sue Coe, Leon Golub, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol, to name a few.
Along with creating her mixed media sculptures, Cat is a fiction writer. Her published writings include “Sickness Can Do That to a Man”, the winner of the Chautauqua Literary Journal Prize for Prose in 2007. She is currently working on a novel, a love story about a family of heavy equipment operators in a small logging town in the Sierra foothills.
“On The Water” is a public art commission awarded to Cat in 2020 and scheduled to be installed in downtown Petaluma, California in early 2023.