Marcia Hafif was an American artist known for her painted explorations of materiality and the perception of color. Hafif’s monochromes probed the formal components of the medium while also tethering those concerns to an outside motif. “The subject can be anything from designing a museum to the writing of foreign calligraphy, from naming weeds to making ice in the desert using cold night winds,” she once explained. “For me they are all experiments for the purpose of seeing more closely.” Born Marcia Jean Woods on August 15, 1929 in Pomona, CA, she studied at Pomona College where she met her future husband, an art history student of the Italian Renaissance named Herbert Hafif. The couple lived in Italy between 19...