Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation

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From the Archives: Emily Mason’s Winter

A photograph of a studio room with a table in front of two bookshelves and hanging pictures. To the right, there are two large windows.
Emily Mason’s studio, Chelsea, New York, 2021. Photography by Steven Rose © 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS.

As Mason noted, “winter in the city is the fermentation of ideas.” 

While in New York City during the cold months of the year, Emily Mason re-evaluated paintings created during the summer months, observing the work in the light of her 20th Street studio. During this season, Mason would also absorb inspiration through giving attention to visual stimuli. She often visited museums, caught current gallery exhibitions, and took snapshots of anything that caught her eye while walking down the streets of New York.

A horizontal abstract oil painting with veils and washes of of reds, pinks, oranges, and bright yellow, with the white of the canvas peeking from underneath.
Emily Mason, Snow Dust, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 28 in.
© 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS.

The winter brought a different kind of production for Mason — one of teaching, as well as reassessment. Observing her paintings in the winter light of New York City, Mason would decide on any changes — often rotating pieces, and playing with orientation. At times, paintings were intuitively reworked. 

As curator Andrea Gyorody notes in the essay Landscapes, Seascapes, and Fire Escapes:
“I find it revealing that Mason believes New York light is somehow clarifying, perhaps not only in terms of the condition of light in her studio, which I can testify is sublime, but also with reference to the atmosphere of the city, the heart of American abstraction that has been the crucible for generations of artists, including Mason and her mother.”

Photograph detail of a fresco fragment, showing the side profile of a beige face with black eyeliner and black eyebrows.
Fresco Fragment Depicting a Woman’s Face in Profile (ca. 1700–1450 BCE), seen at the “Restoring the Minoans” exhibition at ISAW, 2017, photograph by Emily Mason

This traditionally quiet season in New York reconnected Mason with the cultural pulse of the city. She made a ritual of visiting the classics starting with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s frescos in the Greek and Roman Art wing. Mason also kept an eye on new exhibitions at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), continually gleaning inspiration for her teaching syllabi and her own work.