Anne Truitt: Sculpture

June 27, 2000 - October 29, 2000

From time to time, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum will exhibit the work of living artists of distinction.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was pleased to present Anne Truitt: Sculpturewhich was on view from June 27 through October 29, 2000. The exhibition included work produced over the course of the artist's career dating from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Anne Truitt was born in 1921. Her first one-person exhibition was held nearly 40 years ago in 1963 at the André Emmerich Gallery, New York, and was followed by many others, notably at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1973), the Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase (1986), and the Baltimore Museum of Art (1992). Her work will be included in the forthcoming exhibition on Minimalism at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2002. Anne Truitt is represented by Danese, New York.

Truitt's sculptures are rigorous wood structures to which she applies many layers of meticulously painted color. The result is a statement about the richness and beauty of color as something simultaneously substantive and ethereal. As Truitt herself explains:

"I paint these structures with a number of coats, sanding with progressively finer sandpapers between each one, until I have layered color over them in varying proportions. By way of this process, the color is set free into three dimensions, as independent of materiality as I can make it."

Her work is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The most extensive body of her work (sculptures and paintings) is in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the city of her birth.

Truitt is also an accomplished writer who interweaves the threads of her daily activities as artist, mother, and teacher into a fabric reflecting the experience of a long life. Her books, Daybook (1982), Turn (1987), and Prospect(1996) have recently been reissued by Viking Penguin as a trilogy subtitledThe Journey of an Artist.

Truitt's sculptures filled the Museum galleries with sumptuous color. Each is quiet yet powerful, singular yet part of a whole, revealing a sensibility as strong as it is vulnerable. Colors change as natural light plays over them, day by day, season by season. The viewer gradually becomes aware of the quiet sophistication with which Truitt's forms and colors translate and distill the complexities of personal insight and experience.



Truitt's works were made available through the courtesy of Danese, New York.

The exhibition is funded in part by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers' Tax.