For the past weeks, I’ve kept a new monograph on the artist Emily Mason on my glass coffee table, observing the sea of its yellow cover reflect and shimmer. It’s not a rigid object but a source of light, summoning what it feels like to look at her paintings in real life. This is the second monograph I’ve edited. The first was on Emily’s mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, which I’ve pulled off my shelf and tucked beneath the Emily book. Looking at them side by side, they are quite different, just like the two artists. But I also can’t help but see how one book gave birth to the other, how they are inextricably linked. On my table, the dark-blue spine beneath the yellow one, they are like night and day, two parts to a shared story.
Seeing them together has gotten me thinking, not for the first time, about the meaning of a book—why making one can feel important, and why it has felt important to me, as a writer and editor. Books have always been my favorite form for writing, and I think that’s because books are often where writers and artists place their most cherished and personal ideas. Books also transform stories into objects; all the care and time that went into each sentence becomes that much more palpable. Through a book, a story can properly make its mark, have a place in the world, even if it’s just a few inches on a stranger’s bookshelf. The story remains, lives on.
Both Alice’s and Emily’s stories should have had their proper place in the world before now. While their works are distinct, they each chose art styles that were unpopular for their day—Alice worked at the height of social realism, and Emily on the heels of Abstract Expressionism. Alice was one of the first American abstract artists and worked alongside the likes of Ray Johnson, Ad Reinhardt, and Elaine and Willem de Kooning. Emily grew up in this environment, surrounded by great New York City artists, and carried forward her mother’s legacy in abstraction, albeit in her unique language. Alice’s paintings and prints were planned and architectural, in the vein of Piet Mondrian and Arshile Gorky; Emily’s were spontaneous, lit from within, and in dialogue with nature and artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, and Joan Mitchell. Both artists were key figures in the development of American abstraction, and both were underrecognized during their lifetimes.
Alice Trumbull Mason, The Integration of Bearings, 1947, oil on masonite, 28 x 24 in. (71.1 x 61 cm), private collection. © 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS.
My involvement with these books began eight years ago when one of Emily Mason’s assistants at the time, the artist Marela Zacarías, put forward my name as the editor for the Alice Trumbull Mason book. (I knew Marela from a conversation I moderated about one of her sprawling and electric wall sculptures; we’ve remained friends since.) I remember meeting with Marela, Emily, and Emily’s other assistant, the artist Steven Rose, in a studio on the eleventh floor of an apartment building in Chelsea, a naturally luminous space with lots of plants. Emily had been working in that space for the past forty years. She wore her hair in two braids, as I’d learn she liked to do. The three of them shared with me the idea for their project: a book, finally, on Emily’s mother, a pioneer of her time. Relatively little had been written on Alice, much of it scattered and weakly researched. It was time to place Alice within the art-historical record with renewed intention, something a book would hopefully help to do. I learned that Alice, at thirty-one years old, had been the only artist to display an abstract artwork in an exhibition featuring four hundred artists in Washington Square, New York, in 1935. Marela had been working hard on archiving the photos, letters, and bits of ephemera that pertained to Alice. Emily, Marela, and Steven were excited to share all this with writers and researchers, who they hoped would reintroduce Alice to the world.
I was touched to be invited into such an intimate project. It felt like they were taking a chance on me to help shepherd this material—I was, at the time, in my late twenties, still finding my footing as an editor at an online art magazine, and had never edited a book before. From the start, I saw myself as a kind of conduit. The book was always the creation of Emily, and we were doing our best to honor her vision. She was present in every decision, though my direct exchanges with her were minimal; I spoke to her largely through Steven and Marela, who were like her guardian angels.
Portrait of Alice Trumbull Mason in front of her painting Yellow Ochre Ground, 1943. © 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS.
On the first day that I came to visit, they had leaned Alice’s canvases along the walls of Emily’s studio: a sampling of Alice’s early experiments of landscapes with angular trees, followed by the surreal, biomorphic abstractions she made just a couple of years later. Marela had set aside a few photos, including ones of Alice smiling in a photobooth, and some of her letters to her sister, to Emily, and even to Gertrude Stein and William Carlos William—because Alice also wrote abstract avant-garde poems, in which words were like colors or shapes. The letters conveyed Alice’s fierce sense of self and humor (“Maybe you think intellectual life is not the real thing—but dammit—just caring for babies isn’t either”), and of all the archival materials, Emily treasured these letters most. She had just read the book of letters by Emily Dickinson (her namesake) and was inspired to replicate its tactile quality for her mother’s monograph. The artworks, too, “had to have substance,” Steven remembers. The result is a book that reproduces hundreds of Alice’s artworks, alongside scans of her equally vibrant letters, making an undeniable case for her talent and vision while giving an intimate, tactile sense of her lived world.
Perhaps it was the magazine editor in me that was inclined to have as many voices as possible respond to the different aspects of Alice’s story, as opposed to the one monolithic essay that often defines monographs. I wanted to replicate the experience of being alone with Alice’s words and art with an essay, for example, on just the letters (by Meghan Forbes), and another on just a handful of paintings (by Will Heinrich). It was also important to Emily to bring in the two woman scholars who had taken the care to research Alice before anyone else had bothered: Marilyn Brown, who first wrote on a traveling exhibition in 1982 of both Alice’s and Emily’s works, and Christina Weyl, who had written on Alice’s prints. For the book, Brown updated and expanded on what she had written, situating Alice within the history of American abstraction, and Weyl dug into Alice’s remarkable experiments at Atelier 17, the famous studio in Paris of master printer Stanley William Hayter.
Mason in her studio in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2018, photography by Joshua Farr. © 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS.
While working on the book, Emily was diagnosed with cancer. In the weeks before finalizing the book and right after she decided to stop her cancer treatment, she wrote a foreword. She handed her handwritten notes to Steven and her daughter Melany, who then transcribed them. The result was perfect, eloquent; no edits were needed. She shared memories of her mother making soap from bacon grease and ketchup from fresh tomatoes; memories of her mother grinding her own pigment and preparing her painting surfaces with rabbit-skin glue. She shared the time she asked her mother if she thought her lack of recognition had something to do with being a woman—and her mother responded yes. Emily’s foreword communicated the heart of the monograph: the desire for her mother to not only be seen, but also to live on, in book form. Emily died the week the monograph was being shipped to the printer. It pained me that she couldn’t hold the physical result in her hands, and it moved me that she had managed to put the most of herself into the project before she left this earth.
Alice Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American Abstraction was published early into the pandemic. Events were canceled. I was eager for people to see the handsome object; I took a photo of myself holding it in a dress that matched the cover artwork, blocks of red, yellow, and blue. This tragic world event was threatening to make our book feel less real. But as with so many books, it was a question of time before it fell into the right hands. It was an opportune moment, given the growing attention to underrecognized women artists, and it gave certain curators and writers all the encouragement they needed to take their interest in Alice one step further. Alice began appearing in more museum shows and receiving flattering write-ups in the New York Times; the prestigious Galerie Lelong added her to its roster. “I’ll be famous when I’m dead,” she had told Emily.
Shortly after we published the monograph, and in the aftermath of Emily’s death, the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation was formed. Marela and Steven, now the foundation’s director, invited me to be one of the first members of the board, which consisted of people who knew Emily intimately—her two daughters, her niece, her collaborators, her former students and assistants. Some of them had even known Alice. I cannot claim the same personal intimacy toward either artist, but there is the intimacy that comes with making a book: the years getting to know an artist through her creations.
From the outset, our conversations at the foundation revolved around the desire for both Alice and Emily to be better known. We’ve been eager to share their art in contemporary contexts, where they won’t be as narrowly compared to what was popular during their time or competing with male counterparts. Emily might have navigated an art world that was structurally less sexist than her mother’s, but she still lived in the shadows of not only her husband, Wolf Kahn, a successful painter, but of Alice—Emily often suggested that her mother needed recognition before she could focus on herself.
Mason at her easel, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, 1959. © 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS.
It was in the midst of revisiting all of Emily’s and Alice’s artworks and archiving their papers that the prospect of doing an Emily Mason book with Rizzoli came up. We weren’t sure we were ready, or maybe we just knew it would be an overwhelming task. How would we do it this time, without Emily?
We were no longer conduits for Emily, but her advocates. Still, just like the first time, I spoke at length with Steven about how to put the book together, and I listened to him as though I was listening to the artist. For instance, early into planning for the book, he found a sixteen-page document, an incomplete chronology that Emily had written on her life. It was filled with childhood memories, such as seeing “damaged warships” coming through the Brooklyn Navy Yard and visiting her mother’s studio on the Upper East Side and meeting her studio neighbors, Richard Lippold and Ray Johnson. Emily writes of going to the American Abstract Artists show (Alice became the president of the organization) and meeting Piet Mondrian. She relays her time at Bennington College in Vermont and the Cooper Union, where she studied art, and at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, where she saw Jack Lenor Larsen hang “skeins of bright colored wool” between chairs, and it forever changed her perception of how colors can transform one another. When Steven sent these pages to me, he said something to the effect of, “I feel we need to include this in some way.” I agreed, so rather than have a traditional chronology (which is shared on the foundation’s website), we commissioned the writer Naz Cuguoğlu to respond to Emily’s fragments of memory. Cuguoğlu chose to write a series of letters, “in an attempt to hold space for dialogue,” and converses with the artist as she reflects on the chronology and looks through Emily’s own letters and personal archive of iPhone photos.
Emily Mason, Out Shine the Moon, 1958, oil on paper, 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm). Collection of the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation. © 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS.
Like the Alice book, the book on Emily includes a constellation of responses to her work, from an essay focused on her relationship to craft by Jenni Sorkin to a poem by Morgan English that she wrote after staying in Emily’s studio in Vermont, where the artist spent her summers painting. And while Emily did receive the attention of a few wonderful art critics during her lifetime, her work had yet to be looked at in a deeper, scholarly way. The person for this task, it turns out, had been right under our nose: Barbara Stehle, an art historian and curator, who had spoken with the foundation to offer ideas on furthering the legacy of Alice Trumbull Mason. Barbara’s initial love had been for Alice—whom she wrote about for Women’s Art Journal in 2022—but in a sequence of events that felt familiar to me, her deepening appreciation of Alice inevitably led her to Emily. In 2023, Stehle curated a show of Emily’s works at Miles McEnery Gallery, and I remember her showing me around, making revelatory associations with other artists—including Matisse, Degas, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, and Zao Wou-Ki—that we hadn’t previously picked up on. In her essay for the monograph, Barbara expands upon such connections and shows how Emily’s influences were far more diverse and unexpected than those of her contemporaries. In Stehle’s words, “She took American art in an unexpected direction.”
I love the details of this book: the red wash from one of Emily’s paintings in the endpapers; the opening spread of a Dickinson poem that gave it its subtitle, Unknown to Possibility; a photo of Emily’s studio wall with postcards of a Cycladic sculpture, Byzantine painting, and Cézanne’s Still Life with a Curtain. I love that the plates intermix Emily’s paintings with her oils on paper and clayboards, and that they aren’t rigidly separated, because they weren’t rigidly separated in her life. I love, also, the pacing of the artworks over the course of the book, beautifully plotted out by the designer, Eileen Boxer. Some paintings fill entire pages to stun you, others breathe gently in white space, and still others exist in grids, in quiet conversation with one another.
At the last minute, Steven offered to write the foreword. Like Emily’s, his text was similarly complete upon first draft and similarly moving. He wrote of watching her show up to her studio every single day, the cat-food cans that she filled with pigment, the rocking chair from which she’d observe her paintings (she worked on several at once). He wrote about how we had initially endeavored to provide “the comprehensive (re)introduction of a master of her craft.” But he acknowledged that we had found ourselves unable to “pin her down in a tidy art historical narrative,” and as a result this book was a starting gesture. We learned that such definitive books can’t exist, or if they claim to be such, they probably shouldn’t be trusted.
Putting together a book is hard, even grueling at times. There are trials and errors, endless rounds of revisions and proofs. And no matter how many times you read the thing, it’s likely there’s still at least one typo. Toward the end of the journey, you are so eager to get it over and done with that you nearly can’t stand it. Months go by, you might momentarily even forget, and then you get the notification that the advanced copy has been shipped your way, and it arrives one morning. You open the cardboard box and see the cover, like a bit of sun: Emily’s yellow book, as you’ve all come to call it, a detail of a painting. It’s beautiful, you say out loud to yourself, to Emily, as though she’d also arrived at your doorstep.
