It happens sometimes in the most mundane of moments that inspiration strikes. For Mary Corse, it was an early evening drive on PCH in Malibu. The sun at her back, in her words “blasting the road,” illuminated the white dividing lines of the highway and sparked her imagination. This ingredient became the solution to a longstanding problem: to create art that could capture light, transcend the tangible and exist beyond our own finite experience.
The industrial material responsible — glass microspheres, tiny reflective beads used to optimize the visibility of highway lane dividers — became the signature ingredient of her practice. She began mixing them into acrylic paint, layering them onto canvas in vertical bands, and the result was something that had not quite existed before in painting: a surface that does not reflect light so much as participate in it, shifting and brightening as the viewer moves, alive to the conditions of the room. It is nothing new to say that a painting changes whenever someone new stands in front of it, but perhaps no paintings ever fulfilled this notion quite so literally.
Corse emerged in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement — a loose constellation of Los Angeles-based artists, including James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell, who were collectively interrogating perception, light, and the experience of space as primary artistic concerns. It was a significant movement and, like most significant movements of its era, was largely a male affair (well, to be fair, it certainly wasn’t limited to the era). Corse was there from the beginning, and her contributions were only fully recognized decades later. History, as I keep finding myself saying in these little blogs, has a sense of irony.
Listening to the Oral History interview for the Getty Research Institute, it becomes apparent from the opening that art was a constant in her life from primary school, culminating at a private girls school where she studied with a graduate of Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) to her own journey through its program, where the Abstract Expressionist painter Emerson Woelffer was her advisor. Her training pulled in two directions at once: the gestural, embodied mark of Abstract Expressionism and the controlled geometry of Minimalism.
In addition to her artistic training, Corse also completed courses in quantum physics at the University of Southern California in order to handle the Tesla coils that powered her early electric light boxes — an earlier series that sought to capture light through non-traditional materials as many of her peers had been drawn to. But while others largely migrated away from painting into sculptural and environmental projects, Corse ultimately approached the question of light through painting. The brush stayed in her hand, aided by glass microspheres and 220-grit sandpaper, while the canvas remained the site of her exploration.
So, what was she trying to make? She has said it plainly: “The act of painting has the ability to transcend your moment and put you in a different sphere. In painting, I find infinite conversation instead of finite thinking.” Organized by curator Kim Conaty, the Whitney Museum’s survey of her work in 2018, and the first solo museum survey of her career, connected her early explorations of light boxes through those shimmering bands of painted light to the artist’s philosophy: “We appear and disappear.” The exhibition traveled the following year to LACMA, organized for the West Coast by senior curator Carol Eliel — and where, it seemed only fitting, the artist’s lifelong dialogue with Southern California light came full circle.
I’ll confess I went to my first Mary Corse exhibition as a bit of a skeptic. I had only seen her work in reproduction, where it looked like a mottled canvas — a study in silver versus white — minimalism taken to its most austere conclusion. (Take that Malevich!) But the descriptions were intriguing: an artist using light-reflective industrial materials, bridging the concerns of painting with those of Light and Space. As a painter myself, and someone fascinated by both, I was curious enough to go, and the skepticism quickly vanished.
It was the 2012 exhibition at Ace Gallery, light filtering in from the front windows refracting off the surface of the large-scale minimalist canvases. The paintings consisted of vertical bands of white acrylic paint with differing ratios of the glass microspheres so that, removed from the influence of light, the white stripes remain legible. When light hits the surface, it explodes into a symphonic prism of color and light, refusing to stay put on the surface of the canvas. It seems, instead, to occupy the space between the viewer and the work. The prismatic effect was in a state of constant flux, shifting so that the slightest move — a step to the left, a turn of the head, even shifting the weight from one foot to the other — the painting changed.
Corse is, for me, one of those artists who changed the aperture — an artist who united the ephemeral nuance of light and space with the concreteness of painting. Courbet remarked, so many years ago, “that painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things” and Corse counters that famous quip with a new way to think about that concreteness. What, after all, is more real than the existence of light itself? Her experiments in capturing that light were not limited to white, but include occasional forays of color, as well as seeking the same sort of illumination through the blackest blacks known more for its capacity to absorb rather than reflect. She is, in the fullest sense, a set of shoulders to stand on.
he New Yorker noted that these shimmering works are impossible to capture in photographs. That, I imagine, is part of the point. In a contemporary lens, the work offers a breathtaking antidote to Instagram bait. To see a Mary Corse is to be in the room with a Mary Corse. The light does not travel through a screen, though I will admit I do always try. But in the end, it requires attendance and participation, you have to show up, be present and move around with your eyes on the painting, not your phone. And then, like those highway lines on the PCH, the paintings come alive.
Sources:
- “Mary Corse.” Pace Gallery, www.pacegallery.com/artists/mary-corse. Accessed 20 Mar. 2026.
- Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. “Artist Resources – Mary Corse.” University of Oregon, Feb. 2025,
jsma.uoregon.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/jsma-research-guide-mary-corse.pdf. - Mary Corse: A Survey in Light. Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018, youtu.be/TxIclB3psw0.
- Mary Corse Oral History. Getty Research Institute, youtu.be/gUzti_LrFgg.