Funded in part by the American Art Foundation, PaceWildenstein and The Dietrich Foundation

Take a Quicktime tour of the Agnes Martin Gallery>

The Agnes Martin Gallery exhibits a series of seven paintings by Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004), internationally acclaimed artist and Taos resident. The opportunity to show this group of seven oil paintings came to the Harwood in March 1994 when they were first featured in a special exhibition at the Museum. The installation of the paintings mounted on temporary walls in an octagonal arrangement was so favorably received by Martin and Museum visitors that the Museum proposed a permanent gallery to house the paintings. The new octagonal shaped space was constructed as part of the Harwood's landmark renovation and expansion project completed in the Fall of 1997. Each painting is installed on a singular wall of the octagon and can be viewed from benches in the center of the Gallery.

The first showing of Agnes Martin's work at the Harwood took place in July 1947 when, as a graduate student, she took part in the Field School of Art run by the University of New Mexico at the Harwood Museum. The art students lived and worked at the Harwood and, as part of their experience, were given a show in one of the galleries. This was Martin's first show in a museum and it garnered her first written review, printed in the Taoseño and Taos Review: "Among the more advanced students, Agnes Martin and Earl Stroh have turned out some excellent work." - A brief, but certainly prophetic statement.

After teaching at the University of New Mexico briefly and working in Albuquerque, Martin returned to Taos in June 1952. She lived in Taos for the next five years except for periods in New York and Oregon spent teaching or studying. Her paintings were occasionally seen in New Mexico - a group show in Santa Fe, another in Albuquerque. She showed at the Ruins Gallery in Ranchos de Taos, and with Louis Ribak and Beatrice Mandelman at Gallery Ribak a block west of the Harwood.

Her five year stay in Taos was marked by a period of extreme poverty. In 1957, Betty Parsons, owner of one of the premier galleries in New York, came to Taos to see Dorothy Brett. Agnes was able to show Parsons her recent work by setting up an exhibition in a rented space next to the Ruins Gallery. Parsons bought five of Agnes' paintings and told her that she would handle her work if she moved to New York. With the money from the sale, Martin was able to move to New York and soon afterwards, through contacts with other of Parsons' artists, Elsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman, move into a studio in Coenties Slip.

Before the end of the decade, Martin began receiving high acclaim for her innovative art. The various works she created over the next several years, including the famous grid paintings, established her as a major American artist. Barbara Haskell, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, organized a major retrospective of Martin's work in 1992 which traveled to museums in the United States and Spain.

Her years in New York came to an end in 1967 when the building in which she lived was slated for destruction. For a year and a half, she gave up painting and traveled around the West and Canada in a pick-up truck and camper. A vision of an adobe brick prompted her to return to New Mexico in 1968 where she built an adobe and log house on a mesa outside of Cuba.

In 1973, Suzanne Delehanty organized the first major retrospective of her work at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art. Martin resumed her work after building a studio in Cuba in 1974. The first show of her new work was held at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1975. Between 1977 and 1992, she lived and worked in Galisteo, New Mexico. She was invited to join the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1989. A few years later, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, held a show of her paintings and drawings produced since 1974. The show then traveled to three museums in Europe. In 1991, Martin was awarded the "Alexej von Jawlensky" prize by the city of Wiesbaden in Germany. The Austrian government awarded her the "Oskar Kokoschka" prize for international work in the visual arts in 1992. After that, Martin returned to Taos in 1993 and immediately began working on new paintings, including the ones seen in this gallery.

Martin's creative process begins by developing a mental image of the composition so that she has a clear idea of how to proceed. She then concentrates on getting the scale and proportions right. Any painting that leaves her studio must meet the most exacting of standards. She has said, "When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection."

Martin was awarded the coveted Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale in June 1997 for her lifetime achievement of sixty years of painting and her contribution to contemporary art. In the fall of 1998 Martin received the NEA National Medal of Arts as one of the nation's 'foremost abstract artists.' Today, Ms. Martin is recognized as one of the leading contemporary artists. Since moving to Taos, her quiet, modest, somewhat reclusive life-style allows her, to devote her total energies and contemplation to her art, giving birth to a very productive outpouring of joyous and moving works.

image 1 - Mildred Tolbert, "Agnes Martin", ca. 1954, photograph, 9 1/2 x 6 1/2, Gift of the photographer.

image 2 - Agnes Martin (1912), "Untitled", 1994, acrylic, 60 x 60, Gift of the Artist.

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