March Avery: A Life in Color

March Avery: A Life in Color is the first monograph on the New York-based painter March Avery. Documenting the artist’s practice of more than 80 years, the book features three newly commissioned texts and some 200 images.

Avery was born in 1932 to the painters Milton Avery and Sally Michel, and began painting as a child. As she says, “I think I was painting in utero.” The dividing line between life and art was blurred during her upbringing, as is reflected in the subject matter of her work: everyday domestic scenes, portraits of friends and family members, and landscapes visited and revisited over the course of a lifetime.

Avery’s oil paintings, sketches and watercolors are known for their flat picture planes, interlocking shapes and simplicity of forms. The artist’s mastery of colour brings life, immediacy of place and emotional depth to her compositions, as March Avery: A Life in Color illustrates, beautifully.

The book also includes articles by writers/critics Johanna Fateman, Lynne Tillman and John Yau, whose texts explore and animate Avery’s life and work.

March Avery lives and works in New York. Her work is represented in public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages, Stony Brook, NY; Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; and Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Woodstock, NY.

Johanna Fateman is a writer, art critic and founding member of the band Le Tigre. She is a contributing editor for Artforum magazine and writes art reviews regularly for The New Yorker and the art criticism website 4Columns. She recently contributed essays to monographs for Hilary Pecis and Donald Judd.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer and cultural critic. Her books include No Lease on Life, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction; Apparitions, nominated for a Republic of Consciousness Prize; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her writing is published in a host of cultural journals, monographs on Dana Schutz, Steve Locke, Stanley Whitney, Amy Sillman and Raymond Pettibon, and in catalogues for the likes of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the International Center of Photography, New York, NY.

March Avery lives and works in New York. Her work is represented in public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages, Stony Brook, NY; Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; and Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Woodstock, NY.