Celebrating the world vision of a local artist
By Leon Nigrosh
 March
2005 -Terri Priest — the name is synonymous with Worcester’s
art community. As it well should be, as she has lived her whole life here,
teaching art, making her own and even operating a professional gallery.
Today, Priest still lives and creates art in Worcester. And thanks to
Roger Hankins, director of the Cantor Gallery at Holy Cross, we now have
the opportunity to see a survey of more than 45 years of her artistic
accomplishments.
Priest comes from a simple background. She was born in her parents’
home on the East Side and graduated from Classical High. Even as a child,
she was making crayon drawings in her dad’s small grocery store.
She took classes at the Worcester Art Museum and later showed some of
her first paintings based on the color theories of Josef Albers and Johannes
Itten.
It was Priest’s association with Abbie Hoffman as the “in-house
poster girl” during the Civil Rights Movement that was the spark
for her first major series of paintings.The arrangements of bold black
and white stripes in “Organic Interactions” were her attempt
to show that black and white together became a greater sum than either
one could be alone. DeCordova Museum director Fred Walkey saw this work
and from then on included something of hers whenever he mounted an exhibition.
In the early 1970s, Priest introduced broad areas of solid color to go
with her stripes, but this time on eccentrically shaped canvases that
could be interchangeably clamped together and mounted in varying arrangements.
Then at age 50 with her boys grown, Priest decided to go to art school.
She participated in UMass Amherst’s University Without Walls and
gained her B.F.A. by presenting an exhibition called “Aurora.”
Soon after, she produced a new body of work, “Lumen,” for
her M.F.A.
A year later, Terri Priest landed a teaching job at Holy Cross, where
she stayed from 1978 until her retirement in 1993. During that time, she
applied for several small grants that took her to Greece, France and Temecula,
California. After each visit, Priest produced a series of silkscreened
prints that echoed her thoughts at the time. Of her time in the California
nature reserve, she recalls her fear of nature and animals. For protection
from snakes, she and the others were each given a small bell. Ring it
and the handyman would arrive with a shovel to remove the offending rattler.
Her series of needle-like prickles, “Agave,” was her way of
dealing with the three-storey tall cactuses that she had to contend with
daily.
Her first representational works came about in 1994, soon after she discovered
that her sister was dying. “Angels,” an extended series of
collage on painting that incorporated images of heavenly spirits originally
painted by classical masters, was her expression of coming to grips with
the grief she felt.
Always reading about art history, Priest became involved with critical
musings about the Dutch painter, Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) and his enigmatic
genre paintings of anonymous young women — mostly maids or working
girls. Priest felt that these women needed to be given an identity, so
she began place them in new settings and with other painter’s images.
One work, “Vermeer, O’Keeffe & Priest” depicts the
Delft painter’s well-known girl reading a letter with a large Georgia
O’Keeffe flower painting on the wall. And reflected in the window,
there is a ghostly image of Priest herself. Priest has become so intimate
with these women that she speaks of having conversations with them.
Priest’s latest works are “Fragments,” small canvases
with close up details from Vermeer’s paintings. She says that she’s
working out the light, composition and trying to find what’s important.
“I’ve still got lots to learn from him. I don’t know
where I’ll end up, but I have no fear. After all, it’s time
for Terri.”
Nearly 50 examples selected from all these different series — along
with some very early works not seen since they were produced in the ’60s
and ’70s — only begin to capture the spirit of this Worcester
artist who has a world vision, but never strayed far from home.
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