Anne Truitt

American sculptor, 1921–2004

BiographyAnne Truitt was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1921 and spent much of her youth on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She obtained a BA in psychology from Bryn Mawr College and began art training first at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, DC, and later at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts when her husband was transferred to Texas. Most closely aligned with Minimalism and the Washington, D.C.-based Color Field painters, the artist is considered an important figure of American abstraction. Truitt’s first solo exhibition was held in 1963 at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York, and she was included in one of the first museum exhibitions devoted to Minimalist sculpture, Primary Structures, in 1966 at The Jewish Museum in New York. Her work has been the subject of exhibitions at several museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1974, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in 2000. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, organized a major retrospective in 2009 that included sculpture and works on paper. Truitt received numerous honors throughout her career—including fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts—and taught at the University of Maryland from 1975–1991. She also wrote extensively on her art-making practice and published three books—Daybook (1982), Turn (1987), and Prospect (1996). Truitt died in December 2004 in Washington, DC.

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