thePULSECelebrating the world vision of a local artist
An “interaction” with Worcester artist Terri Priest
Priest comes from a simple background. She was born in her parents’ home on the East Side and graduated from Classical High. Even as a child, she was making crayon drawings in her dad’s small grocery store. She took classes at the Worcester Art Museum and later showed some of her first paintings based on the color theories of Josef Albers and Johannes Itten.
It was Priest’s association with Abbie Hoffman as the “in-house poster girl” during the Civil Rights Movement that was the spark for her first major series of paintings.The arrangements of bold black and white stripes in “Organic Interactions” were her attempt to show that black and white together became a greater sum than either one could be alone. DeCordova Museum director Fred Walkey saw this work and from then on included something of hers whenever he mounted an exhibition.
In the early 1970s, Priest introduced broad areas of solid color to go with her stripes, but this time on eccentrically shaped canvases that could be interchangeably clamped together and mounted in varying arrangements. Then at age 50 with her boys grown, Priest decided to go to art school. She participated in UMass Amherst’s University Without Walls and gained her B.F.A. by presenting an exhibition called “Aurora.” Soon after, she produced a new body of work, “Lumen,” for her M.F.A.
A year later, Terri Priest landed a teaching job at Holy Cross, where she stayed from 1978 until her retirement in 1993. During that time, she applied for several small grants that took her to Greece, France and Temecula, California. After each visit, Priest produced a series of silkscreened prints that echoed her thoughts at the time. Of her time in the California nature reserve, she recalls her fear of nature and animals. For protection from snakes, she and the others were each given a small bell. Ring it and the handyman would arrive with a shovel to remove the offending rattler. Her series of needle-like prickles, “Agave,” was her way of dealing with the three-storey tall cactuses that she had to contend with daily.
Her first representational works came about in 1994, soon after she discovered that her sister was dying. “Angels,” an extended series of collage on painting that incorporated images of heavenly spirits originally painted by classical masters, was her expression of coming to grips with the grief she felt.
Always reading about art history, Priest became involved with critical musings about the Dutch painter, Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) and his enigmatic genre paintings of anonymous young women — mostly maids or working girls. Priest felt that these women needed to be given an identity, so she began place them in new settings and with other painter’s images. One work, “Vermeer, O’Keeffe & Priest” depicts the Delft painter’s well-known girl reading a letter with a large Georgia O’Keeffe flower painting on the wall. And reflected in the window, there is a ghostly image of Priest herself. Priest has become so intimate with these women that she speaks of having conversations with them.
Priest’s latest works are “Fragments,” small canvases with close up details from Vermeer’s paintings. She says that she’s working out the light, composition and trying to find what’s important. “I’ve still got lots to learn from him. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I have no fear. After all, it’s time for Terri.”
Nearly 50 examples selected from all these different series — along with some very early works not seen since they were produced in the ’60s and ’70s — only begin to capture the spirit of this Worcester artist who has a world vision, but never strayed far from home.
