published in 2013

This catalog, and the exhibition it chronicles, is the first focused look into the sources and influences outside of the New York Scene that made Mary Abbott the kind of painter she became. Punditry rather neatly ascribes the influence of de Kooning & Co. onto many of Abbott's contemporaries and, while understandable, it rarely tells the whole story. It seems she spent a considerable amount of time in the heady years between 1950 and 1958 deep in the jungles and rain forests of Haiti and St. Croix in the Caribbean. There, separated from the yammering background noise of lower Manhattan, she found her personal muse and guiding light. The bend and sway of the bush and the chaos of the open air market became her teacher and inspiration. The studies and investigations started in the islands returned home where she realized finished works of scale and substance in her Southampton studio.