Worcester Artist Terri Priest to Install Commissioned Work at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Terri Priest, Worcester-based artist and retired Holy Cross professor, will unveil her latest work commissioned exclusively for the College of the Holy Cross titled “Paths to Divine Light Through Vermeer’s Lens” on Tuesday, April 1 at 5 p.m. in Rehm Library at the College. The artwork will be installed in the cupola, a domed area near the entrance, in Smith Hall. Priest will give a talk about her work with a reception to follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Priest was approached by the College four years ago to create a painting depicting the five major religions of the world for the campus building which houses the College’s Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.

“We commissioned Terri for this piece because of the great respect we have for her work and commitment to the love of her family, her faith, the Worcester community and the College of the Holy Cross,” says Frank Vellaccio, senior vice president of the College.

Priest spent a year researching, visiting museums and sketching before she decided on a final painting, which is made up nine panels representing the world’s five most prominent religions — Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam. The four other panels represent “Vermeer’s Lens” arranged in the shape of the cross. The artwork is 9 feet 8 inches by 9 feet 8 inches.

“The overall format of the nine panels emphasizes the circle and the square,” says Priest. “In various cultures these forms have symbolic meaning, the circle representing heaven and the square representing the earth.”

Considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, Johannes Vermeer’s art has been influential in Priest’s work since the late 1990s, when she saw a catalog of his work from an exhibition in Washington, D.C.

“As I studied the wonderful images, I saw a sense of isolation and anonymity of the Vermeer women,” explains Priest. “In the following months, I began to visualize new settings and narratives. Finally, in 1998, I started a series of paintings in which I combined Vermeer's women with quoted images from recognized paintings of the 20th century, and I've been doing that ever since.”

Active in the Worcester art community for decades, Priest’s interest in art started at a very young age, and becoming an artist remained her goal through high school and young adulthood as she took several painting and art history courses at the Worcester Art Museum School of Art and at Assumption College.

In 1960, Priest had become actively engaged in the Civil Rights movement, and was motivated to begin what would become a seven-year series of paintings titled “Organic Interaction.” The paintings were made up of bold black and white stripes — her way of showing that black and white are stronger together.

In 1967, Preist began a second large body of work, titled “Static Variations” that followed closely the “Organic Interaction” series in form and theme. In these multi-paneled and sometimes unconventionally shaped canvases, the “Static Variations” paintings are as large as six feet high and 15 feet long.

Priest earned her B.F.A. and M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her works are included in several museum collections in Massachusetts, including the Worcester Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum, and the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, as well as exhibited extensively in national shows.

Priest became a member of the visual arts faculty at Holy Cross in 1978.  During her time at the College, she taught perspective, introductory and intermediate courses in painting and design, served on various faculty committees and chaired the department for several years.

In 1993, Priest retired from her associate professorship in order to devote more concentrated time to her own painting, as well as to managing and directing the Fletcher/Priest Gallery, a Worcester-based contemporary art gallery.

In addition to her Vermeer-inspired paintings, some of her other works in the 1990s include the “Angel Series,” which was a series of paintings done as a direct response and homage to the death of her sister; and vernacular images such as still lifes of rows of lipsticks by Wayne Thiebaud, or the pop imagery of Roy Lichtenstein.

Priest’s recent solo exhibitions include: Further Conversations with Vermeer, George Marshall Store Gallery, York, Maine, 2005; Interactions: Paintings and Works on Paper, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, Worcester, Mass., 2005; Terri Priest: Reprise, 1963-1976, Hampden Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2002; and Vermeer Women Making Choices, Clark University Art Gallery, Worcester, Mass., 2001.