Last month Patsy Degener passed away. When I first came to St. Louis she was introduced to me as a remarkable person, a great artist and a fierce art critic. Indeed I was very happy to have met a real artist, passionate with her work, opinionated about art, outspoken and with an impeccable taste. I was very much impressed by her ceramics that are a hybrid of sculpture and painting dealing with art historical, mythological and architectural subjects.
She started out to be a painter, but chose ceramics when she lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx early in her marriage.
''After my second child was born,” she told a reporter, “I decided that I was becoming a vegetable. I was trained to paint and I tried to paint, but that was entirely too intellectual with babies around, so I took up ceramics.''
She moved with her family to St. Louis in the '50s and lived here since. Patsy had a rich and productive life and left us her art and her impact in the St. Louis art scene. She was a member of the faculty of People's Art Center, a progressive inner-city program founded by the WPA in 1942. It was the first racially integrated arts program in the city.
She also was responsible for running MECA, the Metropolitan Educational Center for the Arts, a federally funded arts program.
She taught art in the St. Louis public schools, too, in the famous program initiated and run by the late Dr. Marie Larkin.
She influenced and formed the art scene of St. Louis as a founding member of Craft Alliance Gallery and the First Street Forum now the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis and from 1980 till 1990 as an art critic for the St. Louis-Post Dispatch.
No comments:
Post a Comment