Agnes Pelton

Considered to be synesthetic, Agnes Pelton painted sound as colors and forms as they appeared to her visually. She exhibited two “Imaginative Paintings” in The Armory Show in 1913. In the winter of 1919, she visited Taos as a guest of Mabel Dodge Sterne, and began to concentrate on realistic portraiture and landscape oil painting, as well as pastels of Native Americans and desert landscapes. She was a Member of the Transcendental Painting Group with Raymond Jonson, Emil Bisttram, Florence Miller Pierce, and Horace Towner Pierce. (Sharyn Udall, Sensory Crossovers: Synesthesia in American Art)

Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) was a visionary symbolist who depicted the spiritual reality she experienced in moments of meditative stillness. Art for her was a discipline through which she gave form to her vision of a higher consciousness within the universe. Using an abstract vocabulary of curvilinear, biomorphic forms and delicate, shimmering veils of light, she portrayed her awareness of a world that lay behind physical appearances—a world of benevolent, disembodied energies animating and protecting life.  For most of her career, Pelton chose to live away from the distractions of a major art center, first in Water Mill, Long Island, from 1921 to 1932, and subsequently in Cathedral City, a small community near Palm Springs, California. Her isolation from the mainstream art world meant that her paintings were relatively unknown during her lifetime and in the decades thereafter. This exhibition of approximately forty-five works introduces to the public a little-known artist whose luminous, abstract images of transcendence are only now being fully recognized. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/agnes-pelton