A short history

In fifth grade, at my local Chicago Public School, I received my first scholarship for Saturday Classes a the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). I continued at the AIC for six years and recall this as my first encounter with ART. I graduated Northwestern University with a B. S. in 1953.  Afterwards, I received a Moholy-Nagy Scholarship to the Institute of Design (I D) at the Illinois Institute of Technology and graduated with a M. S. Degree in Art  (1956).

In 1967, I was one of the few women to receive a Tamarind Lithography Workshop Grant (Ford Foundation) in Los Angeles. My receipt of a Chicago Arts Council Grant and subsequent work to paint a fresco room at the Sulzer Public Library (Chicago) in the early 1980s landed me in the midst of a national debate about Public Art. I was one of the first women Professors of Art at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1970 -83) and taught subjects ranging from drawing to contemporary theory.  Later, connecting my graduate work in Spanish Literature at the University of Chicago (1985-86) with studies of flamenco and Spanish Art at the Prado in Madrid opened a new dialogue between diverse disciplines for me. 

Over the years, I’ve exhibited in galleries and museums and am part of their permanent collections as well: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, The Brooklyn Arts Museum, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland; Karlsruhe Museum, Stuttgart, Germany, and others.

My visits to the great gardens in Europe, the British Isles, Iran, India, and the Far East have strongly influenced some of my work. As well, my stewardship of 21 acres of land in rural Indiana inspired me profoundly. There, a garden, a pond, fields, forests, streams, an aging apple orchard, cornfields, meadows, and dogs, lots of dogs, contributed to who I am as an artist and human being.

The Pix*

These are landscapes that I view with intensity and affection therefore the original impression, a shot, a photograph, needs to be altered by various means. I shape their memory to produce a kind of aura and I give them my own meaning through this new translation.  Sometimes I reduce to find the essence, other times I embellish. Perhaps I impose a narrative on myself because I have a vague aspiration that the process of alteration can illuminate some longing, some review of events that have passed, that they would have a haunting ambiguity to me. I very much like to think of the final print* as an object to be viewed with pleasure as well as some provocation. 

*Archival Ink Jet prints, dimensions variable.