" However it is defined, her paintings give an ineffable pleasure to those who allow themselves the time to absorb the subtle nuances of line and tonalities that make complex networks of seemingly simple geometric patterns. As the Artforum critic Lizzie Borden put it, they demand "a higher degree of consciousness as the response of the viewer to almost invisible events.".
Agnes Martin was born in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada on March 22, 1912. Following the death of her father, a wheat farmer, a few years later, she moved with her mother, sister, and two brothers to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she attended local primary and secondary schools. Mrs. Martin supported her family by renovating and selling old houses, and throughout her youth Agnes Martin took various jobs with mining and logging companies to supplement the family income. Moving to the United States in 1932, she took classes at Western Washington College in Bellingham from 1935 to 1938. Between 1937 and 1953 Miss Martin taught in public schools in Washington, Delaware, and New Mexico. In between teaching assignments, she continued her education, at Teachers College, Columbia University, from which she received a B.S. degree in art education in 1942, and an M.A. degree in 1952. She was a painting instructor at the University of New Mexico in the late 1940s and at East Oregon College in La Grande in the 1952-53 academic year." "[In 1950] Miss Martin became a naturalized American citizen.
By the mid-1950s Agnes Martin was living in the art colony of Taos, New Mexico, where she joined the Ruins Gallery, which had been founded by a group of artists with a distinctly international orientation. In 1957, however, she returned to New York City at the suggestion of Betty Parsons, a gallery owner who had become interested in her work. Miss Martin settled in one of the abandoned waterfront lofts on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, which had recently been taken over by artists.
