I graduated from Wellesley College in 1962, majoring in Art History. I was most influenced by late medieval and early renaissance art and of course, modern art and architecture. For the latter, the great John McAndrew, the first curator of architecture at MOMA, was my professor. Another revered teacher was Eugene Carroll who specialized in Renaissance and Mannerist art.
Studio courses began after college at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Immersed in the world of artists and exploring the city and its peoples, I was giddy with it all. My most notable teacher was painter Louis Grebenak, who along with his wife Dorothy, an early pop artist, became my lifelong friends.
Work took me to the Lower East Side in 1968 where I was a community worker in Brigade In Action on Ave. C and another education began, the university of the streets. The challenges and celebrations of the mostly Puerto Rican and Black communities were expressed through our magazine project, edited, written and designed by teenagers, The Fourth Street i.
At the same time I initiated a Masters in Painting at Hunter College. The roster of teachers included Robert Morris, but minimalism was not what I was seeking. Vincent Longo was a kind and inspiring teacher.I also was fortunate to study with Mark Rothko and art historian Leo Steinberg.
Motherhood followed, and years of patching together teaching jobs at art centers, museums and colleges. Drawn to children's art, I became a middle school art teacher at the Hudson School, in Hoboken, New Jersey, followed by twenty years at Fieldston Lower School in Bronx, New York. While at Fieldston, with much help and support from the parents and administration, I developed the International Children's Tile Project installed in Van Cortlandt Park. Children and their art became my teachers.
Today I live in Nyack, NY with a studio at the magnificent Garner Arts & Historical Center in West Garnerville, a complex of pre-civil war buildings originally a textile factory. I paint in a building where dye was set into fabric and the hand-hewn beams of the ceiling arch to 36 ft.