Emily Mason at ADAA 2023
The Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation
Booth C9, Miles McEnery Gallery

Emily Mason (1932 – 2019; BFA Cooper Union, 1955) will be subject of a solo presentation of late-career paintings at ADAA this year, curated by the art historian Dr. Barbara Stehle—an expert on the artist’s oeuvre and larger contextualization as a historically overlooked pioneer within the postwar Abstraction movement.

Emily Mason was only a few years old when she began to experiment with professional-grade art materials in her mother’s studio. Born in New York City in 1932 to on-the-scene painter Alice Trumbull Mason, Emily came of age in the 1940s-1950s New York art world, attending her mother’s regular social engagements at the Eighth Street Club with Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, and others. Mason’s family was particularly close with Sally and Milton Avery, as well as Willem and Elaine de Kooning; the latter would babysit Mason's daughters from time to time. She credits the small female contingent of the Club, especially Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, with empowering her to chart her own stylistic course after having been encouraged at the Cooper Union to maintain a more rigid developmental trajectory in her practice.

Mason is perhaps best known for her vibrant pigments and her intuitive grasp of color theory, as well as her unusual painting method: using cat food tins, she mixed pigments and solvents to specific and varied consistencies, then poured them directly onto the canvas in curious interplay with the painting’s other ‘pours.’ Crucial to the overall process was the time elapsed (or sometimes, the lack thereof) between these poured layers. 

Sometimes – not always – Mason would gesturally spread out the poured paint with an actual paintbrush (the one she had used to mix that tin), or apply other physical treatment such as scraping, sanding, finger-painting, or contact with an unconventional tool such as an old t-shirt. Each of Mason’s paintings represents a calculated series of interactions between each mixed paint tin’s distinct alchemy; perhaps a given paint mixture would yield a crackling effect, or a glossy sheen, or an ‘oil on water’ dispersion.

The paintings at ADAA represent Mason’s late-career command of a technical arsenal decades in the making.

Learn more in the above-linked curator statement, and browse a preview of works on view below.