A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with elements from popular culture and craft traditions, Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) is one of the preeminent abstract painters of her generation. Her deceptively simple, even offhand approach to painting - at once asserting ease, complexity, and boundless potentiality - now permeates contemporary abstraction, testifying to her broad influence. A San Francisco native who was part of the early development of conceptual and minimal art in New York, Heilmann committed herself to painting in the early 1970s.

This volume presents the first comprehensive overview of Heilmann's career. Essays by curator Elizabeth Armstrong, art historian Johanna Burton, and Critic Dave Hickey explore her painting since 1972 as well as key earlier works and their relationship to her interests in ceramics, decorative arts, film, and music. Accompanying the first traveling retrospective exhibition of Heilmann's work, this timely and essential volume also details her impact on successive generations of artists and her substantial role in the revitalization of abstraction by a new generation of painters.

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