Florence Miller Pierce

Florence Melva Pierce (July 27, 1918 – October 25, 2007) was an American artist best known for her innovative resin relief paintings. Her work has often been linked with monochrome painting and minimalism.

Early life and education Florence Melva Miller was born on July 27, 1918. She grew up in Washington, D.C. where her parents owned and managed a large boarding school named the Countryside School. As a child traveling to New Mexico to visit her mother's family in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Miller became familiar with the landscape which would later become her home. At fifteen Miller began to study art with a private tutor, May Ashton. It was Ashton who introduced Miller to the Phillips Collection, considered to be the first museum of Modern Art in the United States. It was a rare opportunity for the young girl to develop an appreciation of some of modern art's greatest masters. Miller spent considerable time at the museum and began to take classes at the Studio School there in 1935.

Following her graduation from high school, she wished to continue her study of art. Having learned of noted artist Emil Bisttram's School of Art in Taos, New Mexico, Miller convinced her parents to allow her to attend by arranging a meeting with Bisttram while he was visiting Washington, D.C. mounting a mural exhibition. The following summer, at only eighteen, Miller traveled alone to the remote village of Taos to study with Bisttram. While in Taos that summer, she and the other students painted mostly traditional Southwest landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. During this time she met Theosophists Auriel Bessemer and his wife. The couple had studied with Annie Besant, who was herself a student of Theosophical Society co-founder Helena Blavatsky. This meeting would prove to be a connection to ideas Miller encountered later in the Transcendental Painting Group. Bessemer offered Miller a scholarship to his school, but she decided to return to Taos.

Career

In 1938 Bisttram invited Miller and her husband Horace Pierce to join the Transcendental Painting Group, which he co-founded with artist Raymond Jonson. Miller was one of only two women (along with Agnes Pelton) to belong to the group and, at only 19, she was certainly the youngest member. The definition of Transcendental as "beyond common thought or experience" suggests an exploration of new forms and new visions. The idea, as Miller Pierce said, was “not to paint the world literally ... what one sees, but to create new emotional forms through the psyche.” The resultant wood and foam carvings, which she called "Totems", made by the use of the stencils, are often intricate. On the stones and foam pieces appear some of the basic geometric forms from both early paintings and later resin works (circles, triangles, crescents) but also at times textured grains and amorphous forms that suggest fossils emerging from stone or a forgotten glyphic language. Later works on Styrofoam slabs were painted over with a mixture of sand and latex. These pieces, with their sandstone-like skins, were called Earth Skins. She began to show these in the early 1970s.

Selected group exhibitions 1971 Los Angeles County Fine Arts Fair, Los Angeles, CA 1973 The Fine Arts Museum of New Mexico Biennial, The Fine Arts Museum, Santa Fe, NM 1975 The Fine Arts Museum of New Mexico Biennial, The Fine Arts Museum, Santa Fe, NM 1982 Invitational, Meridian Gallery, Albuquerque, NM 1983 Daily Bread: Art from the Female Experience, Public Library of Albuquerque, Albuquerque, NM 1984 Invitational, Roswell Museum Art Center, Roswell, NM 1985 On the Wall/Off the Wall (invitational), Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM 1989 Albuquerque 50's, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM 1990 The Art of Albuquerque, Albuquerque Community Foundation and the Museum of Albuquerque, Albuquerque, NM 1990–91 Alcove Show Invitational, Fine Arts Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, NM 1992 Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde: 1912–1950, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; traveled to: The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C; Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL; Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX; 1991–92 “The Second Wave: American Abstraction of the 19302 and 1940s – Selections from The Penny and Elton Yosuna Collection,” The Worcester Art Museum, MA; traveled to: Samuel P Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington 1993 Three Women – Mala Breuer, Agnes Martin, Florence Pierce, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM 1994 Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM 1995 Recent Acquisitions from Florence Miller Pierce, Jonson Gallery, University of N M, Albuquerque, NM 1995 Award Recipient Exhibition – SITE Santa Fe Honors New Mexico Artists, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM 1998 The City Series, Cedar Rapids Museum, Cedar Rapids, IA 1999 Postmark: An Abstract Effect, Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM 2001 Originals: New Mexico Women Artists, organized by the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Harwood Museum, Taos, NM 2003 Recipients of Governor's Award, Governor's Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 2004–05 In Pursuit of Perfection: The Work of Agnes Martin, Maria Martinez and Florence Pierce, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, NM 2009 Illumination: Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce 2010 Emil Bisttram and the Taos School of Art, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM 2012 The Transcendental Painting Group, David Findlay Jr. Gallery, New York, NY, 2012 2013–14 American Abstraction 1930–1945, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY Rockefeller University, New York, NY Rust Tractor Company, Albuquerque, NM Sasebo Museum, Sasebo, Japan

Selected books and catalogs 1982 The Transcendental Painting Group of New Mexico, 1938–1941, the Albuquerque Museum. 1982 Daily Bread: Art from the Female Experience, New Mexico Arts Division, National Endowment for the Arts. 1983 Kathryn Gabriel. Transcendental Paintings Inspired by the Landscape and Mind, Quantum, University of New Mexico. 1988 Betty Ann Brown, Arlene Raven, and Kenna Love. Exposures: Women and their Art, Newsage Press. 1991 Susan E. Strickler and Elaine D. Gustafson. The Second Wave: American Abstraction of 1930s and 1940s, Worcester Art Museum. 1992 Gail Levine and Marianne Lorenz. Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde 1912–1950, Dayton Art Institute. 1994 Stuart Shedletsky, Editor. Still Working, The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., Parsons School of Design in association with the University of Washington Press. 1995 Patricia Trenton, Editor. Independent Spirits – Women Painters of the American West, 1890 – 1945. Autry Museum of American Heritage in conjunction with the University of California Press. 1998 American Abstract Art of 1930s and 1940s: The J. Donald Nichols Collection. Harry Abrams Press. 1998 Lucy Lippard, Florence Pierce: In Touch With Light. Palace Press International. 1999 The Transcendental Painting Group: Major Paintings, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York. 2004 Lucy Lippard, in In Pursuit of Perfection – The Art of Agnes Martin, Maria Martinez, and Florence Pierce. Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe. 2005 Julie Sasse. Florence Pierce: A Light-filled Domain, Tucson Museum of Art. 2009 Timothy Robert Rodgers, Sharyn R. Udall, Michael Zakian, and Karen Moss. Illuminations: The Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Pierce. Merrell Press.

Television and film

1943 Meshes of the Afternoon. Short film. Directed by Maya Deren. 1990 "The Art of Growing Older," KNME-TV, Los Colores, NM, February 14, 1990 1994 "Still Working," CBS, The Sunday Morning Show, June 26, 1994