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This is the first monograph to offer a comprehensive account of the work of Californian artist Mary Weatherford (born 1963), beginning in the mid-1980s and extending to the present. Weatherford was a student of pioneering twentieth-century art historian Sam Hunter at Princeton. Her broadly literate and visually arresting paintings address the legacies of American modernists from Arthur Dove and Agnes Pelton to Willem de Kooning and Morris Louis, while grappling with the politics of gender, the representation of specific moods and experiences, and other concerns squarely rooted in the present moment. From her early monumental targets, through canvases studded with real shells and starfish, as well as more abstract evocations of landscape inspired by caves, to her recent neon-appended panels whose atmospheres of rolling color foreground the painting process itself, Weatherford’s works argue forcibly and convincingly for the engagement of painting with contemporary life. Suzanne Hudson’s text, the fruit of many studio visits and long interviews, reveals a singularly inventive artist whose boundless facility for reinvention will compel any viewer, student, or critic of painting.
