New Arrival: Edward Rice

Dormer with Missing Sash, New Orleans 2004-2005

Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Edward Rice has donated this 2005 painting, Dormer with Missing Sash, New Orleans, to the Ogden Museum in memory of James R. "Jim" Gruber, father to our director, J. Richard Gruber. This is the third painting by Rice in the collection, and the second in this style. Based in Augusta, South Carolina, for the last three decades, Rice has used the vernacular architecture of the South as subject, not exclusively, but consistently. In Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes, David Houston writes of Rice's architectural paintings: "Rice's subtle illumination of his subjects made of them something that is both lyrical and literary. Painted on-site, these radient works resulted from a slow, precise, and complex process through which a sense of place, a season, and a time of day were captured in the accretion of telling detail. Viewed retrospectively, it seemed obvious that the element of time is critical to the success of these works from both the artist's and the viewer's separate perspectives. Rice's own understanding of time places his perceptions and the physicality of the canvas in a phenomenological stasis that represents meditation." This is a fine addition to the Ogden's permanent collection, and a fitting companion to Gable Window, 2000, Rice's earlier donation in honor of his mentor, Freeman Schoolcraft, and his wife, artist Cora Schoolcraft.

Gable Window, 1999-2000

Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art