I. Rice Pereira

Irene Rice Pereira (born 1902, Chelsea, Massachusetts, died 1971, Marbella, Spain) was an American abstract artist, known for her work in the Geometric abstraction, Abstract expressionist, and Lyrical Abstraction genres and her use of the principles of the Bauhaus school.

Pereira was forced to begin work in her teens as a secretary to support her family after her father's death. In 1927, she enrolled in night art classes at the Art Students League in New York City. Among her instructors at the Art Students League were Jan Matulka and Richard Lahey. In 1931, she traveled to Europe and North Africa to further her painting studies and she studied with Amédée Ozenfant in Paris.In the mid-1930s she studied with Hans Hofmann, and among her friends and colleagues were Burgoyne Diller, Dorothy Dehner, David Smith, Hilla Rebay, Arshile Gorky, John D. Graham, and Frederick Kiesler. In 1935, Pereira became one of the founders and first instructors at the Design Laboratory, a school patterned after the Bauhaus school.

Pereira's works are displayed at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Phillips Collection, among others worldwide.

Irene Rice Pereira first husband was the commercial artist Umberto Pereira. She later married George Wellington Brown, a naval architect. When this marriage ended in divorce, she married the Irish poet George Reavey in 1950; that marriage, too, ended in divorce. She used the professional name I. Rice Pereira to avoid discrimination against female artists.

External links

* [http://www.irenericepereira.com Official site]
* [http://www.irenericepereira.com/biography/ Biography at official site]
* [http://americanart.si.edu/search/artist_bio.cfm?ID=3761 Smithsonian American Art Museum biography]
* [http://www.americanabstractartists.org/ American Abstract Artists]
* [http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch00849 I. Rice Pereira Papers.] [http://www.radcliffe.edu/schles Schlesinger Library,] Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.