Grace Hartigan (March 28, 1922 – November 15, 2008) was an American abstract expressionist painter and a significant member of the vibrant New York School of the 1950s and 1960s.

[1] Her circle of friends, who frequently inspired one another in their artistic endeavors, included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Frank O'Hara.

Her paintings are held by numerous major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

As director of the Maryland Institute College of Art's Hoffberger School of Painting, she influenced numerous young artists.

[3][4] A planned move to Alaska, where the young couple intended to live as pioneers, ended in California, where Hartigan began painting with her husband's encouragement.

[citation needed] Her early career was characterized by experiments with total abstraction, as seen in the work Six by Six (1951) currently in the collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in Poughkeepsie, NY.

The paintings integrated some of the text of the poems and were exhibited during her third solo show on March 31, 1953, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

[3] On April 18, 1953, Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller selected The Persian Jacket (1952) for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

JFK's assassination and the rise of Pop art (a movement Hartigan vehemently opposed) occurred around this time.

[15] More jovial paintings of the ‘60s included Reisterstown Mall (1965) and Modern Cycle (1967), in which she continued to draw from popular culture, but retained her expressive hand.

Concurrently, Hartigan was experiencing trauma in her own life – alcoholism, attempted suicide and the mental and physical decline of her husband.

[17] Beware of Gifts (1971), Another Birthday (1971), Summer to Fall (1971–72), Black Velvet (1972), Autumn Shop Window (1972), Purple Passion (1973), Coloring Book of Ancient Egypt (1973), I Remember Lascaux (1978)and Twilight of the Gods (1978) were all painted during this period.

Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

[4] Hartigan was struggling with alcoholism,[citation needed] and each day, trying to abstain, put much vigor into her arts practice.

[7] In 2015, Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter,[19] a biography by Cathy Curtis was published by Oxford University Press and Reviewed in The Wall Street Journal.

[22] In 2023, her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

[5] Price died in 1981 after a decade-long mental and physical decline that was caused by injecting himself with an experimental vaccine against encephalitis that left him with spinal meningitis.