This generous collection of work focuses on transitional and mature pieces from the 1960s through the ’80s by artist Florence Miller Pierce. On view at the Wright Contemporary through July 7, 2024.
Florence Miller Pierce: Into the Light
on view through July 7, 2024
The Wright Contemporary, Taos
The Wright Contemporary is proud to present Into the Light, which showcases the work of Florence Miller Pierce (1918–2007). This generous overview focuses on transitional pieces from the 1960s and ’70s, and includes several outstanding resin “reliefs” from her later decades, as well as mysterious sandblasted stones that suggest an influence from local Native cultures.
Florence Miller Pierce was, as they say, the real deal. From a young age she knew she wanted to be an artist, and in her late teens traveled to the then-remote village of Taos, New Mexico, to study at the small and rigorous school founded by Emil Bisttram. She was briefly part of the Transcendental Painting Group (the youngest member and only woman besides Agnes Pelton) and produced several notable paintings guided by the esoteric aims of that movement.
After the death of her husband, Horace Pierce, in 1958, she took a break from art making for a few years but returned with new and startling materials toward the end of the 1960s, when she began sandblasting in stone and experimenting with novel media, like balsa wood, Styrofoam, and eventually resin.
It’s the austere and commanding resin reliefs, some taller than seven feet, that made her name, inviting comparisons with the best of the East and West Coast developments in minimal shapes and “primary structures.” But Pierce was very much on her own trajectory and, as critic Lucy Lippard reported: “After two decades of experimentation in different mediums, Pierce had found her material. The translucent layers of resin and their captive reservoirs of light provided the transcendence she had never quite achieved in her early work.”
Into the Light is on view through Sunday, July 7, 2024, along with smaller exhibitions of works by Marietta Patricia Leis and Francis Reynolds. Visit the website to learn more. The gallery is open Wednesday–Sunday, 2-6 pm, with plenty of parking.
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