Nancy Princenthal wins 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography by Christopher Lyon

We congratulate Nancy Princenthal on winning PEN's award for biography for Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art!

 From the Judges' Citation:

"Agnes Martin, one of the leading abstract painters of the 20th century, is known for spare, contemplative paintings that typically consist of straight lines inscribed on a canvas. Nancy Princenthal, a veteran art critic, has appropriated Martin’s measured style as her own in her fascinating biography of the artist. Among the book’s many virtues is its refusal to sensationalize mental illness. For much of her adult life, Martin heard interior voices and suffered from schizophrenia. Rather than exploiting the facile cliché that views madness as a source of artistic inspiration, Princenthal explains how Martin’s illness threatened to derail her art, and had to be overcome. All in all, a careful and caring biography that serves as a model of nuanced reflection in these screaming, insult-hurling times."