Martha Visser't Hooft

Martha Visser't Hooft was born Martha Hamlin in Buffalo, New York, into a family engaged in the city's civic and cultural life. In the 1920s she studied in Paris at the Académie Julian, where she absorbed Cubism, Surrealism, the Russian ballet and modern music. In 1926 she moved to New York, studying at the Parsons School of Design before transferring to the John Murray Anderson School of Theater Design.

Family trips to Taos, New Mexico, beginning in 1928, introduced her to the circle of patron Mabel Dodge Luhan and left a lasting mark on her imagery. That same year she married the Dutch chemist Franciscus Visser't Hooft and settled in Buffalo. In 1933 she helped found the Patteran Society, a progressive alternative to the conservative Buffalo Society of Artists.

Her mature work combined abstraction with a Surrealist sense of invention, a rare approach in her community. From 1947 until the late 1960s she exhibited regularly at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York, which had earlier introduced Mark Rothko and Mark Tobey. Her paintings often float curved, shard-like forms in fields of saturated color, and she described painting as "creating a bridge from the invisible to the visible." Her art also addressed environmental pollution, Native American rights and women's rights.

She taught at the University of Buffalo from 1956 to 1958, and a major retrospective was held at Buffalo's David Anderson Gallery in 1991. Her work is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center holds the largest collection of her art and archives.