Rose Piper

The American public took note of her work in the fall of 1947 when she gave her first solo exhibition—titled Blues and Negro Folk Songs—at the Roko Gallery in New York. The exhibition featured 14 paintings based on folk and blues songs. The show was very successful and was lauded by art critics; due to its resounding success, the show was held over for an extra week, and the vast majority of the paintings were sold. At the time, Piper was one of only four African-American abstract painters to have had solo shows in New York. After retiring from textile design, she resumed painting and exhibiting in the 1980s.

• Name — Rose Piper • Born — 7 October 1917 • Birth Name — Rose Theodora Sams • Birthplace — New York City, New York, U.S. • Died — 11 May 2005 • Place of death — Connecticut, U.S. • Field — Painting, Textile design • Training — Hunter College

Rose Piper was born Rose Theodora Sams in New York on October 7, 1917. She grew up in the Bronx, where her father was a public schoolteacher who taught Latin and Greek. Piper went to Evander Childs High School where she majored in art earning her a four year scholarship to Pratt Institute due to earning the highest graduating GPA in art. She had to decline due to family pressure. Later, she attended Hunter College, majoring in art and minoring in geometry, and graduated in 1940. From 1943 to 1946, she attended the Art Students League of New York, where she studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. It was during this period that the poet Myron O'Higgins introduced her to Sterling Brown, who encouraged her growing interest in blues music. Brown was the author of "Ma Rainey" (1932), arguably the quintessential blues poem; O'Higgins, his student at Howard University, had also written poetry on blues themes, such as "Blues for Bessie" (1945).

When Piper returned from Paris, a series of financial and family misfortunes forced her to put her painting career on hold. For a time she ran her own greeting card business. She then worked as a textile designer, using the name Rose Ransier. Over the next three decades she built a successful, albeit anonymous, career in fashion, while raising her two children and caring for ailing family members. Her minor in geometry gave her an edge in her new line of work: she was able to design patterns on graph paper that did not need to be adjusted for the knitwear machines. In 1973, she won the Knitted Textile Association's First Annual Knit Competition. When she retired in 1979, she was a senior vice president.

• Illustration — Go Down Neath, Easy An’ Bring My Servant Home by Rose Piper, c. 1988 In the 1980s, Piper returned to painting. This time she adopted a whole new style, influenced by her years in textile design: instead of semi-abstraction and a subdued, melancholy palette, the later paintings combined a meticulous attention to detail and bright acrylics. As influences, she cited Flemish School painters Hans Memling and Jan van Eyck, and the medieval Book of Hours tradition. She still drew inspiration from African-American music, and her sense of political purpose had not changed. In 1989 she had a solo exhibition in New York, sponsored by the Phelps Stokes Fund. The centerpiece, titled Slave Song Series, was a set of ten 12 x 9 inch miniatures based on lines from spirituals. Half were set in contemporary urban locales; for example, Go Down Neath, Easy An’ Bring My Servant Home (pictured right) is set in the 96th Street subway station. Describing her motivation for the series, she wrote that "the current state of many inner-city blacks is not unlike the desperate situation of the slave ancestors."

Piper died of a stroke on May 11, 2005, in a Connecticut nursing home, aged 87.

Piper had two children, a son and a daughter, and was an aunt of the conceptual artist Adrian Piper.

• Blues and Negro Folk Songs, RoKo Gallery, New York, 1947 • 7th Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Prints by Negro Artists, Atlanta University, 1948 • Rose Piper: Paintings and Works on Paper, Phelps-Stokes Fund, New York, 1989 • The Search for Freedom: African-American Abstraction 1945–1975, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, 1991 • A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Spertus Museum, Chicago, 2009