IN HER DEBUT NOVEL, I Am Agatha (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), Nancy Foley channels the distinctive rhythms of a famous artist’s interior monologue. Inspired by a rumored packet of destroyed letters between abstract painter Agnes Martin and a northern New Mexico woman—written sometime after Martin moved to a remote mesa in the late 1960s—I Am Agatha imagines the story of their relationship. Foley, who grew up in New Mexico, renders a searing portrait of an artist who uses her private lens to translate and expand the world. Savor this moving meditation on love, mental illness, and art—and then go contemplate a brilliantly unquiet mind at the Agnes Martin Gallery in the Harwood Museum of Art, in Taos.
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