About the Artist

Martha Visser’t Hooft was an artist and teacher in the modernist tradition, best known for her abstract expressionist work, geometric-totemic abstractions, and surrealism. Her career spanned more than 60 years and she garnered critical acclaim with many awards and distinctions during the course of her long art career. She exhibited extensively in Buffalo, New York City and throughout the United States.

Martha for the most part was a self-taught artist. In 1922 she traveled to Europe to study the works of the emerging modernist painters at the Académie Julian, in Paris, as well as the music and avant-garde theater of the day. She moved to New York City three years later to further her studies at the Parson’s School of Applied Art, where she practiced set design for the theater there. She taught at the University of Buffalo from 1956-58, in Buffalo, NY. Her sister Mary Hamlin Goodwin, designer and patron of the arts, settled in Taos as a member of the Taos Art Colony. Visser’t Hooft visited her often, where she painted the surrounding landscape.


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