March Avery
By: Andrea K. Scott
March Avery is a painter—“It never occurred to me that I’d be anything else,” she has said. That’s because her parents, Milton Avery and Sally Michel, were painters themselves. Now in her late eighties, Avery continues to work six days a week in her lifelong neighborhood, Greenwich Village. She’s a phenomenal colorist (like father, like daughter), at her best when limning the casual pleasures of home. What does happiness look like? Maybe a friendly game of gin rummy (as pictured in “Card Players,” above, from 1983) or a pewter cat and a rosy woman in a candy-striped dress sharing a cerulean sofa. Two dozen of Avery’s tender pictures, made between 1963 and 2018, have found an ideal setting on two floors of an Upper East Side town house, an outpost of the excellent Los Angeles gallery Blum and Poe (through Aug. 9).