I. Rice Pereira - Biography

Biography

Pereira was born Irene Rice on August 5, 1902 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, the eldest of three sisters and one brother. After her father died in 1918 she and her family moved to Brooklyn, New York. In 1922 she began working as a secretary to help support her family in the wake of her father's death and her mothers illness. In 1927, she enrolled in night art classes at the Art Students League in New York City. Among her instructors at the Art Students League were Jan Matulka and Richard Lahey. In 1931, she traveled to Europe and North Africa to further her painting studies and she studied with Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. In the mid-1930s she studied with Hans Hofmann, and among her friends and colleagues were Burgoyne Diller, Dorothy Dehner, David Smith, Hilla Rebay, Arshile Gorky, John D. Graham, and Frederick Kiesler. In 1935, Pereira became one of the founders and first instructors at the Design Laboratory, a school patterned after the Bauhaus school.

Irene Rice Pereira's first husband was the commercial artist Umberto Pereira. She later married George Wellington Brown, a naval architect. When this marriage ended in divorce, she married the Irish poet George Reavey in 1950; that marriage, too, ended in divorce. She used the professional name I. Rice Pereira to avoid discrimination against female artists. She died January 11, 1971, in Marbella, Spain.

The Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), The Phillips Collection, and the University of Iowa Museum of Art are among the public collections holding work by I. Rice Pereira.