She became well known in the late 1960s for her large-scale minimalist sculptures, especially after influential solo shows at André Emmerich Gallery in 1963 and the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) in 1966.

She declined an offer to pursue a Ph.D. in Yale University’s psychology department and worked briefly as a nurse[5] in a psychiatric ward at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.

[6] She left the field of psychology in the mid-1940s, first writing fiction and then enrolling in courses offered by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C.[4] She married the journalist James Truitt in 1947, though they divorced in 1971.

[7] After leaving the field of clinical psychology in the mid-1940s, Truitt began making figurative sculptures, but turned toward reduced geometric forms after visiting the Guggenheim Museum with her friend Mary Pinchot Meyer to see H.H.

She applies gesso to prime the wood and then up to 40 coats of acrylic paint, alternating brushstrokes between horizontal and vertical directions and sanding between layers.

[12] The artist sought to remove any trace of her brush, sanding down each layer of paint between applications and creating perfectly finished planes of colour.

This formal ambivalence is mirrored by her insistence that color itself, for instance, contained a psychological vibration which when purified, as it is on a work of art, isolates the event it refers to as a thing rather than a feeling.

[15] Begun around 2001, the Piths, canvases with deliberately frayed edges and covered in thick black strokes of paint, indicate Truitt's interest in forms that blur the lines between two and three dimensions.

[4] At her first show at André Emmerich's gallery, Truitt exhibited six works of hand-painted poplar structures, including Ship-Lap, Catawba, Tribute, Platte, and Hardcastle.

In Prospect, her third volume of reflections, Truitt set out to reconsider her "whole experience as an artist"—and also as a daughter, mother, grandmother, teacher and lifelong seeker.

[19] Her daughter Mary Truitt Hill was married to the art critic Charlie Finch (1953/1954-2022) and they are in turn the parents of the aforementioned Charles.

Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality.

At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings.

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