March Avery was once quoted as saying “I knew I would be a painter. It never occurred to me that I would do anything else.”
March Avery was born in New York in 1932 to painters Milton Avery and Sally Michel. Guided by her famous father, she began painting as a child. She had her first solo exhibition in 1963. Now in her late eighties, the artist continues to work six days a week in her lifelong neighborhood, Greenwich Village.
Avery’s oil paintings and watercolors resemble certain stylistic characteristics of the family oeuvre, what art historian Robert Hobbs has called the “Avery style”—flat picture planes, interlocking shapes, and a simplicity of forms—while distinguishing her output as her own. The subject matter of her work is also similar to that of her parents: quotidian domestic scenes, portraits of friends and family members, and landscapes visited over the course of a lifetime.
Her work is represented in public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfalk, VA; Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Woodstock, NY; among others.