In her memoir Contradiction Days (2023), JoAnna Novak sets out to write about the late Minimalist painter Agnes Martin. Traveling from her Los Angeles home to Taos, New Mexico, for a residency, Novak orders Martin’s favorite dishes at her favorite restaurants, walks through the town she once haunted, and visits the galleries that house some of her most profound pastel paintings. It’s an effort to deepen her understanding of the hermetic artist, who abruptly left New York in the 1960s and spent the rest of her life traveling and making art, often in solitude. But following Martin’s footsteps to imagine what her life might have been like quickly segues into Novak’s own self-reflections.
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