Marcia Marcus, Painter Rediscovered in Her Last Decade, Dies at 97

Marcia Marcus, a figurative and conceptual artist with a steely will and a bold contemporary style who found fame in the 1960s and then was largely overlooked until she was nearly 90, though she kept working, confidently, decade after decade, died on March 27 in Manhattan. She was 97.

Her death, in a nursing facility, was announced by her daughters, Kate Prendergast and Jane Barrell Yadav.

Ms. Marcus was everywhere that mattered to a young, determined and very talented artist in the late 1950s and ’60s. In Provincetown, Mass., on Cape Cod each summer, painting out of a shack in the dunes. At the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, holding her own. (Willem de Kooning was a paramour.)

She showed at the 10th Street galleries in the East Village, the scrappy spaces run by artists who were ignored by the uptown establishment, and at the short-lived Delancey Street Museum, run by her friends the Tennessee-born Red Grooms and Bob Thompson, the Black figurative painter who died young, both of whom she conscripted to dance and play the bongos at a Happening she staged there. (She read a poem.)

The Whitney Museum included her in its roundup “Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six.” And again, two years later, as part of its “Forty Artists Under Forty” exhibition.