29 Facts About Agnes Martin

1.

Agnes Martin's was awarded a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998.

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2.

Agnes Martin's was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004.

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3.

Agnes Bernice Martin was born in 1912 to Scottish Presbyterian farmers in Macklin, Saskatchewan, one of four children.

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4.

Agnes Martin's moved to the United States in 1931 to help her pregnant sister, Mirabell, in Bellingham, Washington.

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5.

Agnes Martin's preferred American higher education and became an American citizen in 1950.

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6.

Agnes Martin's took a multitude of studio classes at Teachers College and began to seriously consider a career as an artist.

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7.

Agnes Martin's moved to New York City in 1957 and lived in a loft in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan.

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8.

Agnes Martin's often employed a feminist lens when she critiqued fellow artists' work.

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9.

Agnes Martin was publicly known to have schizophrenia, although it was undocumented until 1962.

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10.

Agnes Martin did have the support of her friends from the Coenties Slip, who came together after one of her episodes to enlist the help of a respected psychiatrist, who as an art collector was a friend to the community.

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11.

Agnes Martin left New York City abruptly in 1967, disappearing from the art world to live alone.

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12.

Agnes Martin's rented a 50-acre property and lived a simple life in an adobe home that she built for herself, adding four other buildings over the years.

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13.

Subsequently, Agnes Martin started to write and lecture at various universities about her work.

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14.

Agnes Martin's built an adobe home there too, still choosing an austere lifestyle.

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15.

In 1961 Agnes Martin contributed a brief introduction to a brochure for her friend Lenore Tawney's first solo exhibition, the only occasion on which she wrote on the work of a fellow artist.

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16.

Agnes Martin's did not return to art until 1973 and consciously distanced herself from the social life and social events that brought other artists into the public eye.

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17.

Agnes Martin's collaborated with architect Bill Katz in 1974 on a log cabin she would use as her studio.

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18.

Agnes Martin's went on further to state that she could not conceive of working in any other space in New York.

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19.

Agnes Martin praised Mark Rothko for having "reached zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth".

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20.

Agnes Martin worked in only black, white, and brown before moving to New Mexico.

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21.

The exhibit focused on many, never seen before, works Agnes Martin created at Columbia, Coentis Slip and early years in new Mexico.

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22.

Agnes Martin's was featured in White on the White: Color, Scene, and Space in Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.

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23.

From October 2015 through April 2016, Agnes Martin was exhibited in Opening the Box: Unpacking Minimalism at The George Economou Collection in Athens, Greece alongside Dan Flavin and Donald Judd.

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24.

Agnes Martin's has featured in the ongoing exhibition Intuitive Progression at the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, New York from February 2017 to August 2017.

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25.

Agnes Martin's was featured in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at The Museum of Modern Art in Midtown, New York which shined a light on women artists who worked post World War II and before the start of the Feminist movement.

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26.

International holdings of Agnes Martin's work include the Tate, London and Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden.

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27.

Agnes Martin became an inspiration to younger artists, from Eva Hesse to Ellen Gallagher.

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28.

No-one who has seriously spent time before an Agnes Martin, letting its peace communicate itself, receiving its inexplicable and ineffable happiness, has ever been disappointed.

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29.

Poet Hugh Behm-Steinberg's poem "Gridding, after some sentences by Agnes Martin" discusses patterns in the natural world, makes a parallel between writing and painting, and ends with a line about the poet's admiration of Martin's work.

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