Grace Hartigan was born in Newark, New Jersey on March 28, 1922. Her early childhood was shaped by her grandmother and aunt, who encouraged Hartigan’s creative imagination. Yet her homelife was difficult and she sought freedom. Although she had received a scholarship to attend a small college in New Jersey, her family lacked the funds to help pay for basic necessities. Instead, she took a job in an insurance agency where she met Bob Jachens, her first husband. Jachens introduced Hartigan to art, taking her to the Metropolitan Museum. The young couple married and fled their conservative upbrings for the West Coast. Originally, the pair dreamed of going to Alaska as pioneers, but they never made it any farther than California. No money and pregnant, Hartigan and her husband returned to the East Coast. Jachens was drafted into World War II while Hartigan got a job as a mechanical draftsman.

At this point Hartigan had separated from her husband and began taking courses at the Newark College of Engineering. While there, she was introduced to the work of Henri Matisse by a coworker. Inspired to learn how to paint, Hartigan enrolled in classes by a local artist, Isaac “Ike” Lane Muse. In 1945, the couple moved to Manhattan, and she developed friendships with Abstract Expressionist painters and poets such as Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Frank O’Hara. She also met fellow artist, Harry Jackson, whom she married after her split with Muse. Almost immediately, Hartigan began receiving critical acclaim for her paintings, including participation in Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro’s New Talent exhibition in 1950, her first solo show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1951, and inclusion as the only woman artist in MoMA’s New American Painting exhibition in 1956. Her meteoric rise had a negative effect on her marriage and couple had it annulled. And by 1959, Hartigan had married and divorced for a third time to collector Robert Keene.

Her fourth husband, Winston Price, was a collector of modern art and an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. Despite Hartigan’s five-decade long career, her work from the 1960s onwards is largely left out of art historical discussion because of her removal from New York. Baltimore was seen as an “artistic outpost,” and she failed to receive attention for her painting practice outside of her adopted city. From 1965 on she worked at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she was the director of the Hoffberger Graduate School of Painting. She taught at the school until retiring in 2007, one year before she died.