153. Mary Weatherford

Mary Weatherford is one of the leading painters of her generation, exploring and expanding the legacies of American abstraction. Over the last three decades, Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice: from early target paintings in the 1990s based on operatic heroines, to expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass-tubing that have been a presence in her work since 2012. With a physically embodied approach to painting, Weatherford explores abstraction as both a formal language and a poetic, personal mode of engagement with the world. She and Zuckerman discuss making paintings for other people, failure and not showing for 5 years, paintings of nothing, how she invented the neon, the physicality of her process, pursuing pink, story telling, and the continuum of art history.