March Avery, born 1932, is the daughter of famous and influential American painters Milton Avery and Sally Michel Avery. Inspired by their example, Avery grew up painting with her family and developed a distinct style, one that uses abstract forms and brilliant color to depict the scenes of everyday life. She began painting as a child — although as she would tell it, “I think I was painting in utero.” 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 avoided the influences of Abstract Expressionism embraced by many artists in the 1930s and 1940s. Instead, she always adhered to her father's methods: reducing elements to their essential forms, eliminating many details, and developing flattened shapes and strong colors — a method that became known as “the Avery style”. Even today, Avery is most influenced by her father, who died at age 80 in 1965. Without much parental supervision, perhaps she gravitated to his style by osmosis. Raised with the dividing line between life and art blurred, such is the subject matter of her work: domestic scenes, portraits of friends and family members, and landscapes visited and revisited over the course of a lifetime.

Avery’s depictions of these modest moments in life are deliberately visually accessible, hovering in a space that is not overtly abstract nor distinctly figurative. Nature’s grandeur and the delicate emotions of human intimacy are rendered with an expert ability to collapse complex experiences and three-dimensional spaces into flattened topographies comprised of evocative shapes and forms.

Avery grew up in New York around her parents’ artist friends, such as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. She spent her summers in the country, which has had a clear influence on her work.

The artist never took a single studio or art history class. Instead, Avery hoped she might discover the definition of "truth and beauty" by studying philosophy at Barnard College. Youthful idealism didn't stop the headstrong artist from returning to her roots. "I knew no one but artists, so I knew that is all I would ever be," she says.

Avery married photographer Philip Cavanaugh in 1952 and graduated from Barnard College in 1954 with a degree in philosophy. Avery’s son, Sean, is also a painter.

Avery, who is based in New York, has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the country, including the Chrysler Museum, Vanderbilt University, Bryn Mawr College, the Brooklyn Museum, the Newark Museum, the New Britain Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.