Provincetown, that euphoric seaside escape at the tip of Cape Cod, has inspired some of America’s greatest post-war artists: Pollock, Frankenthaler, Motherwell. This summer, the case is made that any such list should include Marcia Marcus—a darling of the New York art world of the 1950s and ’60s whose work has received some much-deserved shine lately after decades out of the spotlight.

Marcus, who died last year at the age of 97, spent many summers in one of Provincetown’s famed dune shacks making her strikingly modern portraits and collages. While there, she hung out with artist friends like Lucas Samaras (whom she painted) and Alex Katz (who painted her). Even when she wasn’t physically in Provincetown, she was painting its clarity of light, its azure sky, its eccentric spirit.

“There is something so very distinctive about her visual language,” says Debra Lennard, lead curator of “Marcia Marcus: Strange and Clear,” which opens at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum on June 26. The first time Lennard saw a painting by Marcus—1966’s Art and the Family, which fuses collage, portraiture, and drawings by her young daughters—she was struck by how unusual it was. “The more you know about 20th-century American art, you’re like, What is that? It stopped me in my tracks.”

Marcus’s paintings still have that effect. Her style was wholly her own, with a delightfully strange mix of off-kilter compositions, deadpan facial expressions, and historical references. She painted in flat, vivid hues—presaging the work of contemporary painters like Amy Sherald. She was ahead of her time in so many ways; in 1960 she became the first woman to stage a Happening, and she painted herself as a mother when few others would dare to.

“She didn’t question herself,” says her daughter Jane Barrell Yadav, who, along with her sister, Kate Prendergast, has dedicated the past decade to stewarding their mother’s legacy.

The PAAM survey—Marcus’s first solo museum exhibition in 42 years—aims to showcase that unwavering commitment. It will bring together more than 30 objects, mostly paintings from the 1950s through the 1980s but also archival materials like sketchbooks and photographs. But the showstoppers are her self-portraits, brimming, as she did, with confidence and panache.

“Strange and Clear” follows a string of recent presentations that have pulled Marcus back into the zeitgeist. Earlier this year the New York gallery Olney Gleason, which now represents Marcus’s estate, staged a solo exhibition of her paintings, drawing new fans and old friends alike. “As soon as we opened, the legion of painters coming in to genuflect and appreciate the work was immediate,” says the gallery’s cofounder Eric Gleason. Last year the curator Saara Pritchard placed Marcus in conversation with Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh in a well-reviewed show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan. And in 2017, which marked the start of Marcus’s so-called rediscovery, she was the subject of a solo presentation at Eric Firestone gallery and included in a group show at the Grey Art Museum at NYU.

The PAAM show (and an accompanying monograph, out in July from Rizzoli) will serve as an exclamation point on this momentum, its organizers hope. “Marcia, at one point, was one of the key players in the chaotic, messy history of New York art, and she deserves to have that place again,” says Lennard.

It comes as no surprise that the artist behind such distinctive artworks had an independent streak from a young age. Born Marcia Feitelson in Manhattan in 1928, she adored fashion and had her sights set on becoming a designer. But her mother, an accountant and immigrant from Ukraine, insisted she study at a proper college and become a teacher, and so at age 15 Marcia enrolled in New York University’s College of Arts and Science. By 19 she had graduated, and soon after she married Harry Gutman, a man a few years her senior who worked for her father, a window dresser at a department store.

Marrying young was mostly a way for Marcia to leave home. In a 1975 interview, she called it “a weird, ambiguous kind of relationship.” He was kind, she said, but not exactly supportive of her artistic ambitions. The union was annulled in 1949, just shy of their second wedding anniversary.

Leaving the marriage gave Marcia not only independence but an opportunity to pick a new last name. She chose Marcus after her grandfather, for whom she was already named. “If I called myself Marcia Marcus, then I was like myself both ways,” she once said.

In the early 1950s, Marcus took art classes at Cooper Union, participated in a group show at Roko Gallery, and, in the summer of ’52, took her first trip to Provincetown, figuring she’d be there for just a few days. But the dramatic landscape and artistic camaraderie quickly won her over, and she stayed until November. She would return frequently over the next 30 years, often bringing her family with her.

In both Provincetown and New York, Marcus fell in with a who’s who of the avant-garde, befriending feminist critic Jill Johnston, writer LeRoi Jones, designer Sara Penn, and fellow artists including Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Bob Thompson, and Lee Krasner. She had dalliances with Willem de Kooning and Allan Kaprow.

A breakthrough in her career came in 1954 when she attended the Art Students League and studied with Edwin Dickinson, whom Marcus called “the most extraordinary person.” He taught her how to draw, but his real lesson was in how to trust her vision as an artist. From there she found her groove, earning her first solo gallery show in 1957 and inclusion in the prestigious “Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six” at the Whitney.

She met her second husband, Terence Barrell, in Provincetown, and they married there in 1959. Jane was born in 1960, then Kate in 1961. They all lived in a loft on Sixth Street in Alphabet City; the sculptor Lee Bontecou lived downstairs. But what was atypical, even for an artistic family, was the extent to which Barrell took on the lion’s share of the parenting when the girls were young. “She chose my dad, in a way, because he was super supportive,” says Barrell Yadav. He cooked and cleaned and worked as a teacher, and built the stretchers for Marcus’s canvases, even after they split in 1972.

“I didn’t really understand her ambition until I started doing the work that my sister and I have been doing for the past 10 years,” says Predergrast. “I knew she was a painter—that was issue one in the household—but I have grown to really admire that focus.”

Barrell and the girls began to show up in tender family portraits in the mid-’60s and ’70s, when Marcus started incorporating gold leaf and collage elements like dried flowers and fabric scraps in her work. She started painting herself in historical sites, inspired by her travels to Europe. “She was saying, ‘Women were in ancient Greece. Women were at Stonehenge. Women were here,’” says Prendergast. Though Marcus resisted calling herself a feminist, it’s clear she lived it.

But as the decades marched on and new artistic trends like minimalism and Pop art took over, Marcus struggled to show her work. In the ’80s and ’90s she lacked gallery support and institutional backing—an all-too-common story among women artists. And Marcus could be headstrong. “Tact has never been one of my strongest points,” she once said.

“Marcia wasn’t a people pleaser. She wasn’t a joiner,” says Lennard. And that had just as much to do with her belief in her own art. She wouldn’t compromise to make it more market-friendly. She wouldn’t even explain it. She just kept making her work the way she wanted to, with thinned-out paint, broad washes of color, and odd bits of texture here and there.

Marcus held on to her receipts, address books, and diaries and sent them to the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art on the assumption that, someday, interest in her work would resume. A bit presumptuous, perhaps—but she was right. And in that vein, this summer’s show in Provincetown, a place she held so dear, is not just a geographic homecoming, but a poetic one.

“She was a really unusual pioneer,” says Lennard. “And that’s the best kind.”

“Marcia Marcus: Strange and Clear” is on view at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, from June 26 to August 30, 2026.