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“I was never conscious of being a female artist and I resent being called a ‘woman artist’ – I’m an artist. Actually, I don’t even like being called an artist anymore – I’m a painter.” — Grace Hartigan

Artist Grace Hartigan was born on March 28, 1922, in Newark, NJ (d. 2008, Baltimore, MD). As we wrap up this year’s Women’s History Month features, we are pleased to share this interview (we’re not sure of the date) with the famously and fiercely independent Hartigan. A member of the famed group of “Ninth Street Women” abstract expressionist painters with Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Hartigan took up a more representational style again in the 1960s. This shift in style caused a rift with critic Clement Greenberg and others, despite Hartigan being one of the more successful and widely-known artists at the time. In this interview from the Smithsonian American Art Museum at her studio, Hartigan discusses her early abstract years, her inspirations, and how she incorporates imagery into her work.

From the Smithsonian:

Grace Hartigan grew up in New Jersey, where she married the boy next door after graduating from high school. She saw the 1935 film Call of the Wild and decided on a whim to move to Alaska with her new husband. They ended up penniless in Los Angeles, however, and Hartigan returned to the East Coast pregnant and alone. In 1948 she was mesmerized and fascinated by a Jackson Pollock exhibition and lived briefly on Long Island with the artist and his wife. She worked odd jobs in New York through the 1950s to pay for paint, and frequently visited the old-master galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, absorbing images of nudes, demons, gods, heroes [and] saints. In 1959, Hartigan married Dr. Winston Price and moved with him to Baltimore, where she worked in a large studio in Fells Point for decades. (Mattison, Grace Hartigan: A Painters World, 1990)