Irene Rice-Pereira

b. 1902, Chelsea, Massachusetts

d. 1971, Marbella, Spain

Irene Rice-Pereira was an American abstract artist and proponent of Modernism in the United States. Born Irene Rice in Massachusetts, she began taking art lessons at a young age and later attended the Art Students League. She studied under Richard Lahey and Jan Matulka, who introduced her to the European artistic principles of the Bauhaus, Cubism, and Constructivism that would come to shape her work. While she ultimately married three times, she kept the name of her first husband, Humberto Pereira, and often donned the gender-ambiguous title of I. Rice-Pereira. In 1935, she helped found the industrial arts school the Design Laboratory and began to incorporate the avant-garde theory inspired by the Bauhaus. Her work was deeply indebted to her focus on industry and machinery, and she later became known for her geometric and rectilinear paintings. Rice-Pereira was also inspired by her travels to Europe and Northern Africa, incorporating the vistas of Morocco and the Sahara desert into her compositional style and aesthetic philosophy. Her work was exhibited at major exhibitions in New York, including a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in Peggy Guggenheim’s show Exhibition by 31 Women. Beyond her artwork, Rice-Pereira was also a prolific author, producing ten books of poems and essays throughout her life, and she was a sought-after lecturer of artistic philosophy.