March Avery

March Avery was born on October 12, 1932, in New York City. She began drawing and painting as a young child, immersed in her parents' artistic household, and earned a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1954, where she studied philosophy rather than formal studio art. She held her first solo exhibition in 1963. She married Philip G. Cavanaugh, a scholar and photographer, who died in 2022; their son, Sean Avery Cavanaugh, is also an artist. She has been a member of Artists Equity Association and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. As of the most recent reporting, she is in her nineties and continues to paint most days of the week in her longtime Greenwich Village studio.

Her paintings, in oil and watercolor, are figurative, marked by simplified forms and flat, deliberate color, and often draw on domestic life, family, and travel, including recurring subjects from the Italian and Turkish landscapes she has visited over the years.

Much of the writing on Avery situates her within her family's legacy, but recent solo exhibitions, at Waddington Custot in London in 2022, at Blum in Los Angeles and Tokyo through 2024, at Larkin Erdmann Gallery in Zurich, and at Esther Schipper in Seoul in 2026, point to a critical conversation increasingly focused on her own body of work rather than solely on her parentage. Writers covering these shows have emphasized the consistency of her practice across decades and her distinct, pared-down use of color and form, developed independently of her father's more widely known abstraction.

Avery's auction market is small and still developing relative to her institutional standing. The highest price reported in the available auction record is USD 57,600, paid for Turkish Silvertrees (Gulluk), an oil on canvas from 1981, at Doyle in New York on April 20, 2022, which Antiques and the Arts Weekly described at the time as a new world auction record for the artist. Notably, later sales were separately announced as new records without reference to that 2022 result: Karla Drawing brought USD 40,695 at Bonhams in August 2022, and Dark Inlet, from 1980, brought USD 47,500 at Swann Auction Galleries in New York on September 19, 2024. Both of those later prices are below the 2022 Doyle result, which suggests that "record" claims have been tracked inconsistently across houses rather than that the market has cooled. Taken together, the pattern points to a market with very few public sales, in which each new result gets reported somewhat in isolation.

Avery's museum presence, including holdings at the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and several other American institutions, is well established, but her auction history is short and the reported "record" price has shifted more than once between 2021 and 2024 as different houses staged notable sales. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification run primarily through the artist and her galleries. She is currently represented by Larkin Erdmann Gallery in Zurich, with additional recent exhibition activity at Esther Schipper, Blum, and Waddington Custot, though the ongoing status of those relationships beyond their respective show dates is not fully confirmed. Collectors should treat any single auction result as an early data point rather than a settled market trend.