Name: Marcia Marcus: I Paint What I Like
Start: 2026-06-22T18:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-06-22T19:45:00-04:00
Location: Rizzoli Bookstore

A long overdue retrospective of Marcia Marcus, one of America's most daring painters of the late 20th century.
About this Event

Join us to celebrate Marcia Marcus — one of the boldest, most uncompromising, and yet overlooked painters of postwar American art — and the publication of a stunning new retrospective monograph of her career. Author Debra Lennard will be in conversation with art historians Brandon Fortune, Melissa Rachleff, and Daniel Belasco, followed by a signing.

This book's publication coincides with the upcoming exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, opening June 26.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

Can't attend? (please specify that you would like it signed in the comments box at checkout).

Published on the occasion of a major new career retrospective, Marcia Marcus: I Paint What I Like provides a much-needed, extensive monographic exploration of a strikingly original artist.

Headstrong and wry, Marcia Marcus (1928–2025) was a fiercely original artist whose work challenges typical understanding of post-war American art. Rejecting mainstream abstraction, Marcus spent five decades painting what compelled her: languorous male nudes, parenthood, great style—subjects her peers rarely explored—all rendered in her distinctive cool and poised hand. Undaunted by New York’s male-dominated art world, she was a vivid presence in downtown Manhattan and Provincetown, pioneering as one of the first women to stage a Happening. Through decades of self-portraiture, she boldly affirmed her own creative voice and upended narrow expectations of gender with wit and defiance.

This volume illuminates Marcus’s multifaceted significance: innovative artist of post-war New York, creator of radically assertive self-portraiture, and essential forerunner of figurative painting today.

Debra Lennard is a curator and art historian whose research interests include figurative painting of the 20th century. Together with Brandon Fortune, she is the curator of Marcia Marcus’s first major museum retrospective in decades at Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Marcia Marcus: Strange and Clear (Summer 2026). She is also the editor of a new monograph on the artist, Marcia Marcus: I Paint What I Like. Nipping back and forth between London and New York, she is currently Associate Curator with Hayward Gallery Touring: the UK’s leading organizer of traveling exhibitions. Her previous curatorial roles include positions at MoMA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she worked across contemporary collections and exhibitions—and where she first encountered Marcus’s art.

Brandon Brame Fortune is Chief Curator Emerita of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where she has spent her distinguished career advancing scholarship on American portraiture. Her curatorial work ranges from 18th-century American portraiture to contemporary practice, and she has a particular expertise in women artists working in portraiture. Among her notable exhibitions are the National Portrait Gallery projects Elaine de Kooning: Portraits (2015), Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction (2014), and Eye to I: Self-Portraits from 1900 to Today (2018). For the Marcia Marcus monograph, she contributes an essay on Marcus and the art of portraiture.

Melissa Rachleff is a curator and art historian whose work has long centered on overlooked and under-examined artists and movements in postwar American art. She is Clinical Professor in the Visual Arts Administration Program at NYU Steinhardt, and curator of the landmark 2017 exhibition Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU, and its accompanying catalogue. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications, including Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces (MIT Press, 2012). For the Marcia Marcus monograph, she contributes an essay on Marcus and the downtown New York scene.

Art historian Daniel Belasco is Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation, overseeing the collection, educational programs, exhibitions, and historic home and studio in the Catskills. As an independent scholar, his archive-based research in modern and contemporary art has been published in a variety of books, journals, and catalogues, most recently his monograph Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions (Reaktion, 2024).