Beatrice Riese

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/nyregion/beatrice-riese-86-abstract-artist-and-collector.html: Beatrice Riese, an abstract painter whose important collection of African art is now owned by the Brooklyn Museum, died on April 2 at the hospice at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. She was 86. The cause was abdominal cancer, said Roger Mosesson, a friend. Ms. Riese was born in The Hague, the Netherlands. In the 1930's she studied art in Paris, where she was first introduced to African art. In 1940, shortly before the Germans invaded France, she escaped with her parents to Africa. From there they sailed to the United States, settling in Richmond, Va. There, Ms. Riese married a Spanish anarchist she had met on the voyage. She also took art classes with Clyfford Still at Virginia Commonwealth University. After a divorce, she moved to New York City, and supported herself and her young son by working as a textile designer. The abstract painting and drawing style she eventually developed, with its gridded geometric forms filled with finely worked calligraphic lines, suggested the patterns of woven fabric and stitchwork, as well as densely written musical notation and micrography. In New York she studied with Will Barnet, and joined American Abstract Artists, serving as president of the organization for more than a decade. She was a member of A.I.R. gallery in Manhattan, the first nonprofit artist-run New York gallery for woman, now in Chelsea. In a long career, she had more than two dozen solo exhibitions in museums and galleries. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, and other institutions. Along with African art, which she began buying in Manhattan in the 1950's, she collected Native American art. She donated work to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame University, as well as to the Brooklyn Museum, which organized an exhibition of 30 of her West and Central African marks and figural sculptures in 2000. Continue reading the main story