Suzanne Hudson

Lecture 6: Agnes Martin: On a Clear Day

This lecture will discuss the American artist Agnes Martin, focusing in particular on her monumental print series, On A Clear Day--a work notable for its formal and biographical significance, as it represents her return to art-making after a hiatus of many years. Well known as a Minimalist for her finely drawn grids, Martin was nonetheless born the same year as Jackson Pollock; she understood the Abstract Expressionist ethos to be much closer to her work than that of the generation through which her work found its audience. Martin's relationship to questions of the incorporation of subject matter and the form that creative expression assumes will be explored in relation to these broader contextualizations.

Suzanne Hudson is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Southern California. She is cofounder of the Contemporary Art Think Tank and president of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, an affiliate society of the College Art Association. In addition to her work as an art historian, she is an active critic whose work has appeared in international exhibition catalogues and such publications as Parkett, Flash Art, and Art Journal; she is also a regular contributor to Artforum. Hudson published Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT Press) in 2009 and is currently at work on a manuscript dealing with abstraction and spirituality in 1960s America, as well as Contemporary Art: 1989–Present, coauthored and coedited with Alexander Dumbadze (forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell in 2012).