Projecting Planes

Artist Irene Rice Pereira American, 1902-1971

Date1947

DimensionsPainting: 30 1/8 × 40 1/8 in. (76.5 × 101.9 cm)
Frame: 40 3/4 × 51 1/4 × 2 1/2 in. (103.5 × 130.2 × 6.4 cm)

MediumOil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number

1948.71

On View

Toledo Museum of Art (2445 Monroe Street), Gallery, 05

Collections

Paintings

Published ReferencesToledo Museum of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, American Paintings, Toledo, 1979, pp. 90-91, pl. 227.Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art, 35th Annual, 1948, no. 61.

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Juliana Force and American Art, 1949, no. 96, repr.

New York, A. C. A. Gallery, I. Rice Pereira, 1949.

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Loren MacIver and I. Rice Pereira, 1953, no. 27.

Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX. 1953.

Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa. 1953

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California. 1953.

East Lansing (MI), Kresge Art CEnter, Michigan State University, American Art Since 1900, 1960.

Label Text“Without form and structure, there can be no content.” —Irene Rice Pereira Irene Rice Pereira initially adopted the name I. Rice Pereira to obscure her gender because of the discrimination women faced in the arts. Nevertheless, she was able to have a robust and expansive career over her lifetime. While simultaneously working to support her family, she took night classes at New York’s Art Students League in 1927, where she encountered Cubism and Constructivism, two geometric-based styles whose influence is evident in Projecting Planes. After a period of travel, including to Europe, she returned to New York in 1933 at the height of industrialization. In 1935, she became a founder and faculty member of the industrial arts school the Design Laboratory. Inspired by the Bauhaus school’s ethos integrating art, design, science, and technology, she required her painting students to take classes in chemistry, industrial mechanics, and optics. Her own work pursued the relationship between art and science, and she saw it as interpreting humankind’s “plane of existence” in the space-time continuum.