Marking Time: Honouring the Legacies of Agnes Martin, Alma Thomas, and the Gee's Bend Quilters
For The Armory Show 2025 in New York, Antonietta Grassi has created works paying homage to a group of women artists who have come from or have had strong ties to the American south and who have been important inspirations for her. Drawing on and honouring the legacies of Agnes Martin, Alma Thomas, and the Gee's Bend quilters, Grassi is interested in how these artists mark time through works that blend modernist abstraction with references to textile and craft traditions.
From Agnes Martin, Grassi inherits a commitment to structure, repetition, and subtle emotion through the use of delicate tonal shifts and fine line work to create meditative, contemplative surfaces. Thomas's influence is felt in Grassi's rhythmic use of pattern and color, channeling energy and movement within a restrained, grid-based framework. Thomas's cellular patterns find a visual echo in Grassi's repetitive motifs and blocky geometries, though Grassi's repetitions are less tied to nature and more to textile grids, motherboards, and coding systems.
Perhaps most profoundly, Grassi connects with and honours the legacy of the Gee's Bend quilters through her references to textiles, imperfect geometry, and the elevation of craft as a vehicle for memory and meaning. Grassi considers the Gee's Bend quilts as important as any other works in the modernist canon of abstraction. She highlights the woven, patched, and layered nature of quilts while referencing coding systems. Unlike the mathematical precision of weaving, Grassi's painting process is intuitive and responsive to her environment, much like the quilters.
In conversation with these pioneering women artists, Grassi has also honoured the contributions of women such as Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace, whose innovative work in coding laid the foundations for the digital systems that inspire Grassi's own engagement with the intersection of technology and craft.
In honouring these artists, Grassi seeks to blur the boundaries between abstraction and narrative, technology and tradition—creating a body of work that speaks to both our contemporary digital culture yet is deeply rooted in feminist and craft-based histories. Through this synthesis, she articulates her own way of marking time: a layered, rhythmic language that holds memory, gesture, and technology in quiet conversation with these seminal women artists.