Florence Pierce was the youngest member of the Taos Transcendental Painting Group in the 1930s.
She died in October, and there's an art opening for her early and later works Friday at the Jonson Gallery.
Emil Bistram, the group leader and painter theorist, had a handful of students, which included Pierce.
"Bistram, who was this older gentleman born in Hungary - rather thick accent - walked into the studio one day and said, 'Come on. Get in the car. I think you're going to like this,'" curator Chip Ware said.
Bistram drove Pierce and his other students to the Santa Fe home of Raymond Jonson, whom the gallery is named after.
They established the transcendental group in Jonson's living room.
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Having studied mostly 19th-century French drawing and painting in a conservative Washington, D.C., art school, her move to Taos and immersion into the transcendental painting group was new to her, as Bistram required his students to practice celibacy, meditation and vegetarianism.
"They also studied a number of philosophers from Plato through theosophy through Zen Buddhism," Ware said. "So, Florence said this was all brand-new to her, and she absorbed it as quickly as she could, given her 18 years, but she didn't quite know what to make of it all."
Ware said she was taught to not take things at face value but to transcend reality and imagine another world different from our own.
"So, it was a matter of capturing that vision, if you will, which was not easy," he said.
She married Horace Towner Pierce, also a member of the group, and moved to New York City while he had a show at the Museum of Modern Art. They also lived in Los Angeles and Washington.
Pierce's husband thought easel painting was dead and that animated films were the new rage. He tried getting funding to make a movie, but it never panned out. He died in the '50s, and Florence put away her art supplies.
"In the '60s she picked it up again, and she did a lot of carving," Ware said. "She was a tall woman and quite capable with physical stuff, so she'd carve things like doors. She was working with resin one day, and it spilled onto a reflective surface. And she looked at it and thought, 'Oh, how interesting.'"
She experimented with resins, pouring on layers and sanding them down, coming up with surfaces based off the golden ratio - a mathematical formula explaining patterns that occur in nature.
"It's a means of dividing up space for a painting, and it would convey a very natural and organic sense," Ware said. "In other words, there's no effort of making sense out of the paintings. You can look at it and just feel that it's natural."
She poured the resin onto reflective Mylar surfaces, and she was able to experiment with light in this way.
"They reflect the light; they refract the light. It's all about what you can do with light using translucent materials," Ware said. "They're very subtle and visually quite remarkable."
Florence Pierce
Exhibit
Friday-Feb. 22
Jonson Gallery
1909 Las Lomas Blvd. N.E.
For more info, visit Unm.edu/jonsong
