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When Claudia Keep ’15 came to Bryn Mawr, she didn’t want to choose between her interests; she wanted to hold onto all of them — from running, to art history, to French, to art.
Bryn Mawr didn’t offer a fine arts major, but through the Bi-College Consortium with Haverford College, it didn’t have to. More than 40 percent of students at both Bryn Mawr and Haverford take classes at the other school.
Impressed with Bryn Mawr’s History of Art Department, Keep enrolled with the understanding that she could also take studio art classes at Haverford, even though becoming a working artist didn’t feel realistic.
“Being a visual artist and having that as a job just seemed like a total impossibility,” she says. “I thought I could work at a museum or a gallery or something.”
However, Haverford Professor of Fine Arts Ying Li saw a different future for Keep.
“Claudia had an ability, even as a student, to bring a contemporary and personal sensibility to these classical subjects,” Li says. “For a young painter, she had an unusually clear focus and maintained a firm concentration in carrying her ideas through to completion.”
Encouraged by Li, Keep changed her major from French and History of Art to French and Fine Arts. Still, life as an artist remained more of a possibility than a plan.
On the track, her path felt clearer. Keep is one of the top runners in the cross-country program’s history. As a first-year, she became the first Bryn Mawr cross-country runner to compete at an NCAA Division III National Championship. She returned to nationals as a junior and finished 10th in the country in the 5,000 meters, narrowly missing All-American honors.
“Maybe it was youthful visions of grandeur,” she says, “but I was getting so much better, and I thought, the sky’s the limit.”
That trajectory ended in the summer of 2014, when an injury took elite-level running off the table.
After graduation, Keep returned home without the structure that had defined her college years — no training schedule, no clear next step, and no sense of what would come next.
It wasn’t until a trip to Maine the following summer that something shifted.
“Art school is not the only way forward toward a career or life as an artist … In college, I didn’t learn exactly what my career should be, or who I was, but I did learn the skills necessary to pursue what I wanted.”
While visiting family friends, Keep was offered the opportunity to help sculptor Dan Falt run a children’s summer program in his studio. In exchange, she was given space to work on her own art. “I decided to take all of my running energy and put it into art,” she says.
Keep stayed on at Falt’s studio, slowly building a practice that felt like a viable path forward. She started using social media to promote her work and was introduced to patrons by Falt.
Keep met John Sailer, founder of Galerie Ulysses in Vienna, Austria, through Falt, and he exhibited her work at his gallery in 2018. Later that year, Phillip March Jones contacted Keep after seeing her work on social media. He curated a show of her work in Kentucky and now represents her at his Manhattan gallery, MARCH.
Keep now lives in New York as a full-time artist and has shown her work in cities including Paris, Detroit, and Los Angeles, where she is also represented by Parker Gallery.
“Art school is not the only way forward toward a career or life as an artist,” Keep says. “I am grateful to have had a liberal arts education at Bryn Mawr and Haverford. I didn’t feel the pressure to overly define myself but instead to learn and to work really hard. In college, I didn’t learn exactly what my career should be, or who I was, but I did learn the skills necessary to pursue what I wanted when I eventually found what that was.”
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