Six Black Squares (Seis cuadrados negros)

I. Rice Pereira, American, 1907 - 1971, died in Spain

1937

painting

oil on canvas

Gift of Pinnacle West Capital Corporation

2013.112

© Phoenix Art Museum. All rights reserved. Photo by Dan Vermillion.

Estate of Irene Rice Pereira

Modern

Yes

North Wing, Second Floor, American

Among the founders and early members of the American Abstract Artists were a number of talented women. Irene Rice Pereira, along with Esphyr Slobodkina, Alice Trumbull Mason, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Gertrude Greene, and Susie Frelinghuysen, helped promote avant-garde art in the United States. The fact that Pereira signed her work as "I. Rice Pereira," may have been a canny strategy in the male-dominated art world. In 1935, she was one of the co-founders of the Design Laboratory, an experimental school of industrial design aimed at bringing the theories of the famed German modernist group, the Bauhaus, to America.