Grace Hartigan (1922-2008) is renowned for her ability to alternate between abstraction and representation. She challenged the prevailing norms of the early 1950s by incorporating figures, clichés, and elements of modern life into her work. Hartigan was born in Newark, NJ. Unable to afford college, she married at 17 and worked as a mechanical draftsman in an airplane factory while her husband went off to war. She studied under painter Issac Lane Muse and later moved to New York City, where she immersed herself in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Throughout her creative career, Hartigan switched between several styles and themes, even though her large-scale abstract paintings gained her recognition.

Hartigan's work was showcased in the pivotal Ninth Street Show in New York in 1951 and featured in other significant group exhibitions, including at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1957, Documenta in Kassel, West Germany in 1959, the Guggenheim Museum in 1961, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1989 and 1999, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1992 and 1999. She also had solo shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1980, Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York in 1993, and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York in 2001.