Lot 188: ROSE PIPER (1917 - 2005) Unbalanced Objects Being Balanced.

ROSE PIPER (1917 - 2005)
Unbalanced Objects Being Balanced.

Mixed media on paper, 1978. 360x280 mm; 14x11 inches. Signed, titled and dated "May 78" in ink, upper right.

Provenance: collection of the artist; private California collection.

This later surrealist drawing reflects the life struggles of Rose Piper, one of the most promising painters in the late 1940s. A graduate of Hunter College, she won consecutive Rosenwald fellowships in 1946 and 1947 and was associated with painters Charles Alston, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Vaclav Vytlacil. She then received wide critical acclaim for her solo exhibiton Negro Work Songs and Blues at the Roko Gallery in New York in 1947. She also travelled to Paris where she took classes at the École des Beaux Arts and won first prize in the 7th Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Negro Art in 1948. In 1952, Piper was forced by financial pressures to work primarily as a designer in the garment industry.

When she returned to painting full time in 1980, she returned also to national exhibitions. Her work was included in the the touring museum exhibition, To Conserve a Legacy, American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and The Search for Freedom: African-American Abstraction 1945-75, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, and she is featured in anthologies of African-American art by Leslie King-Hammond, Sharon Patton and Richard J. Powell.