Mary Weatherford [Hardcover]

This is the first monograph to offer a comprehensive account of the work of Californian artist Mary Weatherford (b.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 colour foreground the painting process itself, Weatherfords works argue forcibly and convincingly for the engagement of painting with contemporary life.

Suzanne Hudsons 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.
From her early monumental targets, through canvases studded with real shells and starfish, to her recent neon-appended panels, Weatherfords works argue forcibly and convincingly for the engagement of painting with contemporary life. Suzanne Hudsons text reveals a singularly inventive artist.Suzanne Hudson(MA, PhD, Princeton University) is an art historian, critic, and Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. Her publications includeRobert Ryman: Used Paint(2009),Painting Now(2015) andAgnes Martin: Night Sea(2017). She is also a regular contributor toArtforum.Foreword, Barry Schwabsky; Introduction; 1 Origins: 19631980s; 2 Concentric Circular Timelines: 19851991; 3 Stains and Starfish: The 1990s; 4lc!