Eunice Lulu Parsons (born August 4, 1916), also known as Eunice Jensen Parsons, is an American modernist artist known for her

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...

s. Parsons was born in

Loma, Colorado Loma is an unincorporated town, post office, and census-designated place (CDP) located in and governed by Mesa County, Colorado, United States. It is part of the Grand Junction, CO Metropolitan Statistical Area. The Loma post office has the ...

and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Portland Museum Art School, where she also worked as a teacher for over 20 years.

Early life and education

The daughter of Florence Alta (Weed) Parsons and Brainerd Parsons, Eunice Parsons was born in

, in 1916. Her family lived briefly in Montana, but when she was age four, her family moved to Chicago. In 1934 and 1935, she attended children's art classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was married to Allen Herbert Jensen from 1936 to 1960, and they lived in Portland, Oregon, raising three children there. From 1950 to 1954, she studied at the Portland Museum Art School. In 1957 she took a bus to

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., to study

abstract expressionism Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...

. Her sketchbooks from that trip demonstrate her early inclinations in "color, line, and shading, all developing into a unique and distinctive style".

Career

Parsons joined the faculty of the Portland Museum Art School as a painting instructor, where she was known as a "blunt but brilliant" teacher. She also taught printmaking and composition between 1957 and 1979. Her career has also included teaching classes at Portland State University. Parsons was a co-founder of the 12x16gallery in southeast Portland, a cooperative which exhibited artists' work between 2006 and 2017. She exhibited new collage works, ''Eunice Parsons, La Centenaire'', at the Roll-Up Photo Studio Gallery in Portland to celebrate her centennial year in 2016. At age 100 in 2017, she was the only remaining living artist from the 2004 group exhibition, "Northwest Matriarchs of Modernism", at Marylhurst University's gallery,

The Art Gym The Art Gym is a nonprofit, noncollecting contemporary arts exhibition space at Marylhurst University in Marylhurst, Oregon near Portland, United States. The Art Gym is devoted to the artwork of the Pacific Northwest supporting retrospectives, m ...

. That exhibition had also included artists

LaVerne Krause LaVerne Erickson Krause (1924–1987) was an American artist. She founded the University of Oregon printmaking program and taught there for twenty years, creating more than ten thousand paintings and prints in her lifetime. An advocate for artist ...

, Maude Kerns, Mary Henry,

Sally Haley Sally Haley (June 29, 1908 – September 1, 2007) was an American painter. Her career spanned much of the 20th century and she is credited for helping to expand the emerging art scene in Portland, Oregon, during the middle of the century. Much o ...

, and

Hilda Morris Hilda Grossman (Deutsch) Morris (1911–1991) was an artist and sculptor of the Northwest School, working mainly in bronze. Biography Grossman was born in New York City in 1911. She studied art at Cooper Union and the Art Students League of Ne ...

Critical reception

Called an American master of collage, Parsons uses torn and cut paper, words and phrases to create "striking and evocative collage works." Her work is held in permanent collections at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, the Jordan Schnltzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Kaiser Permanente and the Portland Art Museum. Isaac Peterson at PortlandArt.net called Parsons' collages "painterly", writing that they are "composed with intricate consideration, but occasionally she moves with a speed and daring any skater would admire". Marc Andres of Portland Community College described Parsons' process of creating collage as one of creation and destruction, adding that it is "at once both extremely spontaneous in its generation and equally methodical in its resolution". Blair Saxon Hill compared her artistic style to that of European artists like Kurt Schwitters or Miró. In a 2005 review, Victoria Blake wrote of Parsons' view that "collage, like life, is an art of imperfection, of the torn edge and the spot of glue". Blake continued that Parsons has "the ability to recognize the chance encounter for what it is: potential in its purist form".

Exhibitions

* Marylhurst University –

* Willamette University, Hallie Ford Museum of Art * Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR * Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR * Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. * Marylhurst University,

, Portland, OR * Portland Community College, Helzer Art Gallery, Portland, OR

Awards and honors

In 2001, Pacific Northwest College of Art presented an honorary

Master of Fine Arts A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.) is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts admini ...

to Parsons, as well as displaying "Eunice Parsons, a Fifty Year Retrospective" at the college's Felman Gallery. In addition, philanthropist Stephen Wiener donated an endowment for student travel scholarships in Parson's name.

References

External links

the Art of Eunice ParsonsPortland Art Museum Online Collections: Eunice Jensen Parsons
* (video 26:06) * (video, 6:32) * (video, 6:34) * (video, 6:59) {{DEFAULTSORT:Parsons, Eunice 1916 births American centenarians Artists from Colorado Artists from Portland, Oregon American collage artists Women collage artists Living people Pacific Northwest College of Art alumni People from Mesa County, Colorado School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni Women centenarians 20th-century American artists 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American artists 21st-century American women artists