NEW YORK MAG
Wendy Goodman, 1 March 2021

Her paint-flecked smocks are still hanging on a hook, and the small footstools she perched on to study her work are in place. Her rocking chair, another vantage for studying her paintings, is nearby, as are a pair of her favorite velvet gondolier slippers, which she would buy on every trip to Venice.

ART IN AMERICA/ARTNEWS
Jackson Arn, 11 Feb 2021

Comprising twenty-two paintings made between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, the exhibition “Emily Mason: Chelsea Paintings,” at Miles McEnery, is a shrine to that indifference: the quiet confidence it demands, the glory it can bring.

BROOKLYN RAIL
Elizabeth Buhe, Feb 2021

Even the most resolutely abstract artworks have a powerful associative capacity that allows the ascription of various real-world referents, a process akin to looking up at the clouds . . . Mason’s paintings accommodate the external world not only in their relation to nature but in their consummate openness to others.

NEW YORK TIMES
Will Heinrich, 17 Jan 2021

Cascading tides of bright yellows and pinks can easily look garish, and so can the often raggedy edges between them. It takes a little while to get used to the volume and pick out the subtleties. But once you do, you find constructions as delicate and deceptive as spider silk.

HYPERALLERGIC
Karen Chernick, 11 Jan 2021

Chelsea Paintings, the newly opened exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery, is the artist’s first gallery show since her death in 2019 and showcases 22 abstract paintings Mason made after moving her brushes and cat food tins full of pigment to 20th Street.

THE BROOKLYN RAIL
David Ebony, 12 Feb 2020

Known as a consummate colorist in her brilliantly hued painterly abstractions, Emily Mason died on December 10, 2019, age 87, at her home in Vermont after a prolonged battle with cancer. December 10 is the birthday of her favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, and Mason regarded each of her paintings as a visual poem, aiming for the expressive, and—dare I say—spiritual quality that she found in Dickinson’s verse.

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Neil Genzlinger, 7 Feb 2020

“It is important to balance city life with experiencing nature,” Ms. Mason, a native New Yorker, told the magazine Western Art & Architecture in 2018. “Winter in the city is the time for the fermentation of ideas. Summer is my time to carry them out.”

SANTA FE REPORTER
Iris McLister, 24 April 2018

Whether she set out intentionally or not to do so, Mason’s dreamily hued, lushly abstract paintings are delicious counterpoints to the work of some of her more macho peers. As abstract as they are, Mason’s process belies intention and remarkable control, even when paint is spilled, smeared or dribbled across a surface.