Prospect

Based on journals written in 1991 and 1992, Prospect contains Anne Truitt's luminous reflections on her rich, full life as an artist, mother, grandmother, and teacher. Preparing to confront the unpredictable twilight of life, Truitt charts her fears and triumphs, joys and sadness, her most poignant memories of the past and clearest visions for the future. In the year of her seventieth birthday, events converge that force Truitt to reevaluate her life. She requests of and receives from her New York gallery a major retrospective of her thirty years of painting and sculpture, thus throwing her work into the public eye. Simultaneously, she is forcibly retired from the tenured position at the University of Maryland, which had granted her professional and financial security. In her introduction Truitt notes, "writing became in the course of the year a relentless exposure of myself to myself." Keenly observant, she faces her own vulnerability and draws knowledge and insight from sources as varied as Cicero, the Antarctic explorers, and her own travels in the Canadian wilderness. Preparing for the New York retrospective and successive exhibits, Truitt remembers her inspirations, reflects on the development of her artistic methods and goals, and, above all, considers the meaning of both art and an artist's life. At the same time, she records the delights and tragedies that accompany a family's growth. For Truitt, art and life are inexorably joined, and her narrative sings with the colors and surfaces of her celebrated sculpture.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.