Longtime artist Melissa Zink died Friday in Taos after a long illness. She was 77.

"Melissa was so talented in so many ways, a fabulous painter, sculptor, and mixed-media artist, and for a long time all her work was devoted to her great love of books, which she termed 'the book experience,' " said Stephen Parks of Parks Gallery in Taos. "In fact, she's the reason we opened the gallery," said Parks, who knew Zink for more than 30 years and has featured her work since the gallery opened in 1993.

Zink moved to Taos from Kansas in the late 1970s, where she developed her fanciful and thought-provoking imagery, both in two-dimensional work and 3-D tableaux of figures. "I make what I love — museums, magically sealed containers, animals, pots, secrets, surprises, and the history of people," she said in 1979. Such components informed her work throughout her career. According to Parks, Zink thought of artists as falling into two categories: miners and explorers. "(Melissa) was an explorer, always looking for new and more interesting ways to express her feelings about books and words and writers, bindings and papers, etc.," he said.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Mo., Zink's formal education was extensive. She went to Emma Willard School, a private school for girls in Troy, N.Y.; Swarthmore College, Pa.; the University of Chicago; and the Kansas City Art Institute. Prior to her becoming an artist full time, she operated a custom-frame shop.

New Mexico Magazine published a monograph on the artist in 2006 written by Hollis Walker: Zink: The Language of Enchantment. "Melissa Zink was the most talented and inspired artist I have ever had the privilege to write about," said Walker from her home in Berkeley, Calif. "She followed her inner urgings and intellectual curiosity with zeal and clarity of purpose. She was a technical virtuoso, equally astute as a ceramist, painter and sculptor. Her work continually evolved, growing ever more abstract, and yet also more personal in her final years. She was a tremendous role model of a woman who came fully into her own power."

In 2000, Zink was selected as the sole artist to represent New Mexico in the exhibition From the States at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. A year later, she was the recipient of the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts. Examples of her work have been published in numerous books and periodicals, including Exposures: Women and Their Art, New Sage Press, 1989; Contemporary Art in New Mexico, Craftsman House, 1996; 100 Artists of the Southwest, Schiffer Publishing, 2006; and such magazines as American Ceramics, Art & Antiques, Art News, Harper's Magazine, and Sculpture Review, as well as the Wall Street Journal.

Zink's art is represented in many private, corporate and public collections throughout the U.S. In New Mexico, one can see her work at the Harwood Foundation Museum in Taos, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, the Roswell Museum and Art Center, St. John's College Library and the Capitol Art Collection at the Roundhouse.

Surviving family members include her husband, Nelson Zink of Taos, her daughter Mallery Downs and husband Robert of Albuquerque, and one grandson, Christopher Downs of Denver. According to Parks, soon after her marriage to Nelson, she was asked by her husband what she wanted to do with her life. Pulling the covers over her head, she whispered: "I want to be an artist." And that she was.