This painting is recorded in the Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation archives and catalogue.

EMILY MASON (b. 1932, New York City; d. 2019, Brattleboro, Vermont) was the daughter of Alice Trumbull Mason, one of the founders of the American Abstract Artists organization. Emily was raised in an aesthetic environment influential in her pursuit of an artistic career. A graduate of New York’s High School of Music and Art, she did undergraduate work at Bennington College before transferring to Manhattan’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A scholarship to attend Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine was decisive for her; there, Jack Lenor Larsen introduced her to analogous color relationships, a concept that she referred to as “visual magic” and that proved foundational for her art. Mason was subsequently awarded a Fulbright grant to travel 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 celebrated Greenwich Village artists’ society the Club, where artists of the New York School gathered in the late 1940s and ’50s, she married him in Venice, returning to New York after further travels.

Mason’s first one-person exhibition opened at the artists’ cooperative Area Gallery, New York, in 1960, followed by annual one-person shows in 1961 and 1962. It was not until 1977 that she had another solo exhibition in New York, at another artist-run gallery, the Landmark Gallery. In 1979 she began to teach at Hunter College, City University of New York, where she would continue to teach until 2019, the year of her death. In 1984, the art dealer Grace Borgenicht invited Mason to join her stable of artists, giving her a solo show that year followed by others in 1987, 1990, and 1992. In 1997 Mason moved to the MB Modern Gallery, where she had two solo exhibitions before shifting to the David Findley Gallery in 2003. Miles McEnery first showed Mason’s work in 2017, then mounted important monographic exhibitions in 2021 and 2023 and represents the Emily Mason/Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation in New York City. The Almine Rech gallery, in collaboration with the Foundation, is currently presenting her first retrospective in Europe, in Paris, early in 2026. She has been the subject of several monographic exhibitions, including those at the Bruce Museum, Brattleboro, Vermont (1995, 2018, 2020), the Zimmerli ArtMuseum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (2007), and the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont (2019). Mason’s work is held by major public, corporate, and private collections, including the Bennington Museum; Boston Mutual Life, Canton, Massachusetts; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the National Academy Museum, New York; the University of New Hampshire Museum of Art, Durham, New Hampshire; and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. Monographic publications include Emily Mason: The Fifth Element, by David Ebony and Robert Berlind (2006), and Emily Mason: The Light in Spring, by Ebony andChristina Weyl (2015). Most recently, Rizzoli Electa published Emily Mason: Unknown to Possibility, by Barbara Stehle and other writers (2025).