SANTA FE, NM.- An exhibit of work by Florence Pierce will open at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art on December 15 and extend through January 7. An opening reception will be held on Friday, December 15 from 5-7 p.m. with a special Artist Reception to be held the following day, Saturday, December 16 from 2-4 p.m. at the gallery, which is located at 200 West Marcy Street, Suite 101.

Florence Pierce was, at nineteen, the youngest member and one of only two women in the Transcendental Painting Group in Taos in the late 1930s and early 40s. Now in her eighties, she has had a distinguished career, moving from oil painting into various other media, including sculpture. For the past thirty years, she has worked with different forms of poured resin.

A comprehensive view of her career and work can be seen in Lucy Lippard’s “In Touch with Light”, published in 1998.

Florence Miller Pierce has said, “My works are contemplative. They’re about stilling the mind.” The works selected for Pierce’s December exhibition at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art were chosen with this idea in mind. Choosing such works is not difficult, due to Pierce’s roots among the Taos Transcendentalists who were influenced by Kandisnky’s “On the Spiritual in Art” as well as translated works of Zen Buddhism, Nietzsche, Jung, and others. Her work, from the beginning, had an affinity with transcending of “ordinary” mind.

This is the first time Pierce’s Sumi ink drawings of the late 1950’s will be exhibited. In the 40’s, while living in Los Angeles, Pierce had become interested in Eastern art, studying it particularly for its “living lines.” Sumi-e, the practice of ink drawing in Japan, is notable for the use of (mostly) monochrome black on either thin rice paper or silk. In the late 50’s, Pierce executed a series of Sumi drawings, placing wet, tissue-thin rice paper over rocks in her back yard. These pieces, primarily black on white, are abstract and spontaneous, yet contain a suggestion of the rock-forms beneath, an organic origin.

Following the death of her husband, Pierce ceased working for several years. The works that immediately followed this fallow period were the sandblasted Totems and Stones, works of balsa wood, foam, and stone. These black carvings, made by the use of stencils, are often intricate. These works contained some of the basic forms from both early paintings and later resin works (circles, triangles, crescents) but also at times textured grains and amorphous forms that can suggest fossils emerging from stone or a forgotten glyphic language.

The final pieces in this exhibit are Pierce’s more well-known resin works. Although there will be some of Pierce’s much-admired white pieces in the exhibition, there will also be five black pieces, never shown before. These black resin relief’s contain under and over layers of color, on a square format. These black works, with their soft matte surface, like Pierce’s white pieces, are deeply quiet, mysterious. The layer of color (for example gold, blue, or red) used as an under painting the layers of black resin do not show through as true color, but affect the nature of the blackness itself. On the edges, in proper light, color emanates, and light infuses the black and seems to travel, and live, within the resin. As Lucy Lippard, in “In Touch with Light”, remarked “Light was the major player in transcendental painting, and it remained so in most of Miller’s art.”

In some ways very different in appearance, there is a satisfying connection between each of these mediums. Black balsa wood sculptures are carved from out a blank (white) space, black Sumi ink moves on white rice-paper, black resin pieces interact with white gallery walls. In the dialogue between these diverse works it becomes apparent that the action of creating them arose from a stilling of the mind. They invite us to pause. The effect of the exhibit as a whole is one of opening, slowing down, an opportunity to watch the mind’s movement.