EmilyMason (b. 1932, New York City; d. 2019, Brattleboro, Vermont) was the daughterof Alice Trumbull Mason, one of the founders of the American Abstract Artistsorganization. Emily was raised in an aesthetic environment influential in herpursuit of an artistic career. A graduate of New York’s High School of Musicand Art, she did undergraduate work at Bennington College before transferringto Manhattan’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Ascholarship to attend Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine was decisivefor her; there, Jack Lenor Larsen introduced her to analogous colorrelationships, a concept that she referred to as “visual magic” and that provedfoundational for her art. Mason was subsequently awarded a Fulbright grant totravel and paint in Venice, where she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti.In 1957, having met the artist Wolf Kahn (1927–2000) at the celebratedGreenwich Village artists’ society the Club, where artists of the New YorkSchool gathered in the late 1940s and ’50s, she married him in Venice,returning to New York after further travels.
Mason’s firstone-person exhibition opened at the artists’ cooperative Area Gallery, NewYork, in 1960, followed by annual one-person shows in 1961 and 1962. It was notuntil 1977 that she had another solo exhibition in New York, at anotherartist-run gallery, the Landmark Gallery. In 1979 she began to teach at HunterCollege, City University of New York, where she would continue to teach until2019, the year of her death. In 1984, the art dealer Grace Borgenicht invitedMason to join her stable of artists, giving her a solo show that year followedby others in 1987, 1990, and 1992. In 1997 Mason moved to the MB ModernGallery, where she had two solo exhibitions before shifting to the DavidFindley Gallery in 2003. Miles McEnery first showed Mason’s work in 2017, thenmounted important monographic exhibitions in 2021 and 2023. The Almein Rechgallery currently has sole representation of her estate and mounted her firstretrospective in Paris early in 2026. She has been the subject of severalmonographic exhibitions, including those at the Bruce Museum, Brattleboro,Vermont (1995, 2018, 2020), the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, NewBrunswick, New Jersey (2007), and the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont(2019). Mason’s work is held by major public, corporate, and privatecollections, including the Bennington Museum; Boston Mutual Life, Canton,Massachusetts; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the NationalAcademy Museum, New York; the University of New Hampshire Museum of Art, Durham,New Hampshire; and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. Monographicpublications include Emily Mason: The Fifth Element, by David Ebony andRobert Berlind (2006), and Emily Mason: The Light in Spring, by Ebonyand Christina Weyl (2015). Most recently, Rizzoli Electa published EmilyMason: Unknown to Possibility, by Barbara Stehle and other writers (2025).
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