Artist

Grace Hartigan

born Newark, NJ 1922-died Timonium, MD 2008
Media - portrait_image_113203.jpg - 90136
Photograph by Duane Suter. Courtesy Grace Hartigan.
Born
Newark, New Jersey, United States
Died
Timonium, Maryland, United States
Active in
  • Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Nationalities
  • American
Biography

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)

Videos

Exhibitions

Media - 1999.17 - SAAM-1999.17_1 - 67483
Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
November 1, 2008December 15, 2011
Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum features forty-three key paintings and sculptures by thirty-one of the most celebrated artists who came to maturity in the 1950s.
Media - 1967.129 - SAAM-1967.129_1 - 65164
Artist to Artist
October 1, 2021May 18, 2025
Artist to Artist features paired artworks, each representing two figures whose trajectories intersected at a creatively crucial moment, whether as student and teacher, professional allies, or friends.