The Thunder Hurried Slow: Emily Mason Paintings, 1968 – 1979
Presented with the Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation
Miles McEnery Gallery
525 West 22 Street, New York
14 December 2023 – 3 February 2024
Emily Mason (1932 – 2019; Cooper Union, 1955) will be the subject of a new solo exhibition, The Thunder Hurried Slow: Emily Mason Paintings, 1968 – 1979. The exhibition explores a distinct phase in the career of an artist whose circle of influence spans three generations of art history—from being nurtured into the American Abstraction movement by way of her artist-mother Alice Trumbull Mason’s close circle of friends including Josef Albers; Ad Reinhardt; and Piet Mondrian, to serving as a professor and lifelong mentor to contemporary artists including Nari Ward.
Rather than a career survey, the new exhibition and its literary accompaniment deliberately stop short of Emily Mason’s 1979 career delineation that occurred when she moved her New York art practice to a sprawling art studio of her own. Instead, The Thunder Hurried Slow conveys honest insight into a deeply inventive early period of Mason’s career – a time in which the 1970s cultural climate melded with a pressure cooker of personal circumstances to yield a foundational body of work that fascinatingly speaks to the larger oeuvre that Mason would round out in the four decades that followed.
Learn more in the above-linked materials, and browse a preview of works on view and archival materials below.
