Mary Heilmann

Mary Heilmann: The All Night Movie

''The All Night Movie is the story of my life told in words, painted images and photographs." -Mary Heilmann

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside a monograph, creating an artist's book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from her childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships and formative life experiences.
Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann's evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book: included with the artist's memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972 to 1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was codesigned with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition.
Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating sculptures and moved into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation Award, as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.