Like many of the Taos Modernists, Agnes Martin came to Taos by way of New York City. Born in Macklin, Canada in 1912, Martin immigrated to the United States in 1932. While in New York she attended the Teacher’s College of Columbia University. After receiving her degree in 1941 and completing a year of art teaching, Martin decided to become an artist herself and devoted herself to painting.

Settling in Taos in the early 1950s, it was here when a visiting gallerist, Betty Parsons, discovered her paintings of biomorphic, abstract forms. Parsons offered to represent her on the condition that she move to New York. In 1957, Martin settled in Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, a neighborhood that was home to artists such as Lenore Tawney, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Over the next decade, Martin’s organic abstractions would be pared down to the spare grid paintings for which she would be best known. Shortly after she was included in the 1966 exhibition Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Martin lost her studio in Coenties Slip and left New York, seemingly at the height of her career.

In 1972, Martin began painting again. She settled in Cuba, New Mexico, eventually moving again to Taos. Painting and living an ascetic lifestyle, she remained in Taos for the rest of her life. The one luxury she allowed herself was a white Mercedes sedan, which she drove from her retirement community to her studio each day. When Martin passed away in 2004, her ashes were buried at the foot of her favorite tree at the Harwood Museum of Art.