Untitled

Florence Pierce, the youngest member of the Taos Painters Group, was born in Washington, D.C. Her interest in art emerged at an early age, but her formal training did not begin until she was enrolled in 1935 at the Studio School of the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery (since renamed the Phillips Collection). At the museum, she learned of Emil Bisttram’s Taos School of Art and soon traveled to New Mexico to study at the school for the three months of summer in 1936. By 1938, she was painting strong abstract paintings of a single floral or shell-like motif suspended in a background of indeterminate space, using a palette of two or three contrasting hues. Morang described her work as projecting “the non-objective into a slightly mystical field of beautiful color relationships.