Biography: Edward Rice

            EDWARD RICE (American, b. 1953)

            North Augusta, S.C., native Edward Rice (b. 1953), is one of the Southeast’s most prominent contemporary painters. Rice’s 2011 museum solo exhibition Preservation of Place: The Art of Edward Ricewas at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Ga.. The exhibition was accompanied by an extensive catalogue. Other museum solo exhibitions include another one at the Morris Museum and those at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C.; the Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of Art; the Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum in La Grange, Ga.; and the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. Rice also was represented in The Story of the South: Art and Culture, 1890 – 2003, the inaugural group exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. 

            Rice has had solo exhibitions in numerous commercial and institutional galleries, including if ART Gallery in Columbia, S.C.; the Charlotte & Philip Hanes Gallery, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, N.C.; Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta, Ga.; Marguerite Oestreicher Fine Arts in New Orleans, La.; Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, N.C.; and Summit One Gallery in Highlands, N.C. His work was, among others, in group exhibitions at Babcock Galleries, New York; Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Spalding Nix Fine Art, Heath Gallery and Mason Murer Fine Art in Atlanta; the Sumter County (S.C.) Gallery of Art; 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, S.C.; the Gibbes Museum; the Greenville County Museum; and Vanguard Gallery in Cork, Ireland.

Rice’s paintings are included in museums and corporate and private collections throughout the Southeast. They include those of the Columbia (S.C.) Museum of Art, the South Carolina State Museum, the Gibbes Museum, the Greenville County Museum, the Morris Museum, the Georgia Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum.

            Aside from scores of group exhibition catalogues, Rice has been the subject of several solo exhibition catalogues. The McKissick Museum in 1987 published Edward Rice: Paintings and Drawings.  Edward Rice: Architectural Works, 1978-1998was published by the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta. The same venue also published Edward Rice: Tree Paintingsin 1990. Edward Rice: Recent Monotypeswas published by the Morris Museum of Art in 2003. If ART Gallery in Columbia, S.C., in 2008 published the catalogue Edward Rice: Paintings 1996 – 2008; in 2014, the gallery published Edward Rice: Fortress Series. In 2011, Rice was included in E. Ashley Rooney, 100 Southern Artists.

            Rice has been the recipient of several South Carolina Arts Commission awards, including a SCAC Fellowship. In 2014, he received the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts, the state of South Carolina’s highest recognition in the arts. Earlier this year, Rice’s work was included in SC.Fellows Part I, the first part of the SCAC’s 50^thanniversary retrospective of its visual arts fellows, at 701 Center for Contemporary Art.