EXHIBITION PREVIEW

Preview of Edward Rice's work in if ART Gallery's November 6- December 6, 2008 exhibition Edward Rice Paintings: 1996-2008 at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street, Columbia, SC.

More images to come!

Cornice, 2002-2006

Oil on panel

10 x 8 in.

$ 2,200

Cornice With Brick Facade, 2002-2008

Oil on panel

32 x 24 in.

$ 8,200

White Barn, 2007-2008

Oil on canvas

15 x 25 in.

$ 4,500

American Gable, 2007

Oil on canvas

48 x 48 in.

$ 25,000

Belfry, 2000-2007

Oil on canvas

20 x 16 in.

$ 5,000

Cow Shed, West Cork, 2007

Oil on panel

8 x 10 in.

$ 2,2000

River God, 2006

Oil on canvas

51 x 39 in.

$ 17,000

Dormer With Down Spout, 2003-2004

Oil on canvas

30 x 24 in.

$ 9,500

Sunflower In June, 2005

Oil on canvas

24 x 12 in.

$ 4,800

Dormer With Missing Sash, New Orleans (Grisaille), 2004-2005

Oil on canvas

30 x 24 in.

$ 8,500

Charleston Cupola, 2001-2003

Oil on canvas

48 x 30 in.

$ 16,000

Pilot House IV, 2001

Oil on panel

24 x 16 in.

$ 5,200

Palace (Urbino), 1996

Oil on canvas

48 x 36 in.

$ 18,000

Mill, 1995-1997

Oil on canvas

36 x 36 in.

$ 10,500

Rome, 1996-1998

Oil on canvas

48 x 36 in.

$ 18,000

Cross, 1998-1999

Oil on canvas

30 x 30 in.

$ 7,500

Dublin I, 2008

Oil on canvas

24 x 24 in.

$ 5,500

Dublin II, 2008

Oil on canvas

24 x 24 in.

$ 5,500

Dublin III, 2008

Oil on canvas

24 x 24 in.

$ 5,500

Roadside Barn, 2008

Oil on canvas

32 x 50 in.

$ 16,500

Orange Barn, 2007-2007

Oil on canvas

15 x 25 in.

$ 4,500

Darkness, 2007

Oil on canvas

24 x 30 in.

$ 7,500

Dark Barn, 2007

Oil on canvas

11 x 14 in.

$ 2,500 each

Sunflower In August, 2005

Oil on canvas

48 x 32 in.

$ 18,000

Spire (Grisaille), 1998-2001

Oil on canvas

48 x 30 in.

$ 15,000

Essay: The Contemporary Edward Rice

By Wim Roefs
October 2008

With his Dublin I, II and III, of 2008, Edward Rice has created his first non-objective paintings; a 1998–1999 painting of a cross with equal-length arms against a white-blue sky also was minimal but still a cross. The Dublin paintings are squares divided into four equal, differently colored, smaller squares. They are studies in color and materials – that is, the properties and effects of different oil paints applied in various ways and color combinations.

The Dublin paintings succeeded Rice’s small, quickly executed Dark Barn paintings of 2007. These barn paintings all are the same size, pared down to the same basic, no frills shape – a two-thirds detail of a simple structure, painted straight on, flat and symmetrical, with its gaping entrance dead center, against a solid sky, and with a straight, horizontal band of space in front.

The Dark Barn paintings also are studies in color and materials. Rice arrived at the basic barn shape after creating several other barns of the same shape and positioning but in different sizes and colors. The initial barns, such as Small Barn of 2007, are basic, too, though not quite as stripped down as what would follow. They have more definition as real buildings, with an overhang that casts a shadow on the structures’ front, and are executed more exactly.

The first set of barns, modeled on a building that Rice had observed and photographed for years, developed from a long line of architectural paintings, stretching back to the mid-1990s, in which Rice meticulously rendered details of dormers, spires and steeples, cupolas, gables and facades in general. Those detail paintings themselves were preceded in the 1980s by numerous paintings of complete buildings, or, rather, facades, set in their environment. They include a series of mansions, more modest homes and other structures in Rice’s hometown, North Augusta, SC, where he has his studio, and Augusta, Ga., where he lives.

It would be tempting to view Rice’s development as a painter as a rather linear one, in which he moves neatly toward an increasingly stark, minimalist approach. That’s not quite the case. For one, while Rice is best known for his architectural paintings, he has created substantial bodies of landscape, botanical and figurative paintings and continues to do so along with the architectural works.

Not even his architectural paintings developed as seamlessly as the summary above suggests. While Rice in the mid-1990s made a more-or-less wholesale shift from full-fledged buildings to architectural details, his mid-1980s detail painting Dormer fits effortlessly in his later work. Moreover, since the late 1990s, Rice has zoomed in an out in his cropping of architectural elements. Consequently, the degree to which his compositions were minimal and abstract, yet highly detailed, has gone back and forth.

Palace (Urbino), 1996, comes across more abstracted than, say, Pilot House IV of 2001. Cornice With Brick Facade, 2002–2008, a realistic, life-size detail of horizontal bands of wood and bricks, is more minimal than, for instance, Dormer With Down Spout of 2003–2004, as is American Gable of 2007. The Dark Barn series preceded White Barn, with its well-defined facade. And the non-objective Dublin paintings won’t stop Rice’s return to meticulous representational paintings.

Perhaps Rice increasingly has discovered his modern, even contemporary self. His traditional methods and techniques, relentless study of old and early-modern masters and his intense focus on the effects of light and, consequently, on color, are well documented. But Rice never merely painted buildings, people or vegetation. From early on, he searched for qualities beyond the architectural structure, the figure or the plant.

His early paintings of mansions and modest homes had obvious social implications, as did Public Housing, 1995, in which a law enforcement center looms forebodingly over public housing. Many of Rice’s earlier architectural paintings have an eerie, even somewhat artificial quality. 923 Telfair, 1983–1986, depicts a mansion that at best looks like a dollhouse and at worse, like a place where scary stuff happens. The vegetation in 110 Briggs, 1985–1986, and 125 ½ Walker, 1982–1983, has an artificiality reminiscent of Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau’s late-19th, early-20th-century work.

Rice’s buildings have a human quality and are in your face, staring at the viewer, the towers and dormers even staring the viewer down. His 21 late-1980s paintings of parts of one fig tree are studies in personality under changing circumstances. Sunflower In August, 2005, takes on a different life once it’s clear that the work is based on John J. Audubon’s 19th-century bird prints. Sunflower In June, 2005, has distinctly human qualities.

In his architectural work, Rice’s search for personality beyond the structure has led him to study less, more, including smaller patches of light more intensely. Several grisaille paintings forced a focus on shape, structure and line. Zooming in on details and eliminating context increased the focus on line, geometric shapes and their interaction as well as the characteristics of materials, both those of the architectural structures and Rice’s paints. In the process, Rice has connected to modern and contemporary art. He took a different route to elements of minimal, abstract and conceptual art than most but has arrived there nevertheless.

Wim Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery, Columbia, SC

Essay: Edward Rice's Expansive Sense of Place: 1993-2008

by J. Richard Gruber, Ph.D.
October 2008


Looking back from New Orleans to the two cities Edward Rice has called home, both situated on the banks of the Savannah River—Augusta, Ga., and North Augusta, S.C.––I often remember Rice’s intensive appreciation of the history of these two distinctive Southern places. During the fifteen years that I have known him, Rice has maintained a regular routine (except while away on his travels)—driving east in the morning, across the Savannah River, to his South Carolina studio, and returning to his Georgia home in the evening—literally, and metaphorically, bridging the cultural worlds of two historic Southern states. During these same years, reflecting Rice’s larger interests, he and Anna El Gammal have continued their international travels and recently completed the construction of a house in Anna’s native region, County Cork, Ireland. Rice’s work has been exhibited and collected increasingly in Ireland during this time. By choice, however, he always returns home, to the Savannah River Valley, bringing expanded experience and knowledge to the place where he was born, where he addresses an evolving range of artistic issues and subject matter in his studio.

Born and raised in North Augusta, he regularly crossed the river and explored the larger city of Augusta, then went to live there (while maintaining a presence in North Augusta), discovering his artistic mentor and the foundation of his professional career. In unique ways, both cities have been vital to his art and his career, as documented by David Houston, who has known Rice and studied his works for many years, especially his architectural imagery. “Architectural themes, from his most youthful efforts to his recent work, have been a constant concern and most of the buildings he chooses to depict are drawn from a two mile area of downtown Augusta, Georgia, and a few city blocks in North Augusta, South Carolina.” Observing that Rice possesses an awareness of the paintings of artists such as Edward Hopper and Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, Houston notes that Rice’s works reflect structures that are “at once specific and placeless,” concluding that they “are often so precise in their representation of a particular building, that they transcend their specificity and suggest the archetypal.” (1)

Rice first met his mentor, artist Freeman Schoolcraft, in Augusta at the age of sixteen, when he tried to enter an invitation-only Schoolcraft reception at the Augusta Museum. Schoolcraft, who witnessed the receptionist’s rejection of Rice’s pleas to enter without an invitation, interceded, telling her that the young Rice was his personal guest. Schoolcraft, a worldly and accomplished Chicago artist who moved to Augusta with his wife Cora (an artist and Augusta native) after a heart attack almost ended his career, became a strong role model and mentor to Rice (and, for a time, was his father-in-law). Rice had studied art from an early age—at the home and studio of Edith Alexander in North Augusta and with Louise Mallard at the Gertrude Herbert Institute in Augusta—before enrolling in classes at Augusta College with Eugenia Comer, David Jones and Freeman Schoolcraft. (2) With Schoolcraft (who also taught at the Gertrude Herbert Institute), Rice discovered what he had been looking for--a sense of clear artistic direction--first in Schoolcraft’s Augusta College classes, then in his Lombardy Court home and studio (which Rice helped build) near the Augusta College campus, and later in painting expeditions across the region—with Schoolcraft offering Rice practical and technical expertise as well as first-hand lessons in the process of becoming a professional artist in America. Schoolcraft imbued his dedicated student with the rigors and responsibilities of the artist’s life, offering an understanding of an artist’s place in his community, and impressed Rice with his rigorous and disciplined work ethic, derived from Schoolcraft’s own academic training with Lorado Taft and his varied experiences during the Great Depression. (3)

After studying with Schoolcraft (and marrying Schoolcraft’s daughter Faye), Rice began to teach art and assumed the position of Director at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art (where he had once studied and where Schoolcraft taught), establishing a broader presence within the cultural and social worlds of Augusta. In 1982, he decided to focus exclusively on his art, left his position at the Gertrude Herbert and opened a new downtown studio, where he began painting a series of architectural subjects on 4’ x 4’ canvases.(4) Working at 20 Eighth Street, in an historic brick building near the Savannah River, he established his own rigorous work schedule (maintained to the present day), demonstrating to the leading citizens of the city (and to himself and his mentor), that an artist “worked” and kept regular business hours, just as they did. Although I missed this period in his career, I heard fond tales, from multiple sources, about those days and his daily routines as well as his precise schedule—painting all morning in artist garb, before changing into a shirt and tie to lunch with traditional Augusta bankers and businessmen, then returning to his studio, hanging the shirt and tie on his door, and returning to his easel and work clothes.

When I arrived in Augusta, in the spring of 1993, to assume the position of deputy director at the newly opened Morris Museum of Art, his studio had moved to North Augusta. He had moved there in 1990--not far, probably less than two miles away--yet it seemed a greater distance, to a world apart, both in place and in time. In those days the Lucerne Street cottage was a basic, flat-roofed structure—with an open studio room with a low ceiling, a hall and bath, and two small adjoining rooms—both former jail cells, measuring 9’ x 11’ (the original metal jail cages were stored outside)--little changed from when it served as the North Augusta jail. His grandfather, known as Chief Weeks, had served as the chief of police in North Augusta for decades when he bought the decommissioned jail building, moved it to Lucerne Street and converted it to his retirement home. Rice works now in an updated version of the North Augusta structure, completed in 1996 to designs he created with his brother, Matthew, an architect and then a professor of architecture at Clemson University.

As described to me, Rice and his brothers grew up visiting their grandparents and often spent weekends on Lucerne Street, less than a mile from their home, at the small house he recently described as “a place of wonder.” He and his brothers loved to roam the neighborhood, playing in the woods and the nearby spring, as well as in the city park that faces his studio, often discovering shards, arrowheads and fragments from the earlier Native-American and colonial cultures that populated the Savannah River region. He treasured those historic objects then, as he does now. He also remembers making some of his first drawings on his grandparent’s kitchen table in this house (works he rediscovered after his grandmother’s death). As he recently noted in describing his memories of this structure, his most recent works (including some in the current exhibition) were created in the same room where he made those childhood drawings, with his grandparents nearby. Rice’s working, and contemplative, studio is a comfortable environment, functional and self-contained, even more so since he bought the small brick house adjoining the studio in 1996 (where his tenant, the librarian at the Morris Museum of Art, has lived for twelve years). Here, he has created a world that feels both traditional and contemporary, one that is distinctly his own, filled with memories and experience.

From my office at the Morris Museum, on the Savannah River, it was a five-minute drive to the studio, a short journey to a quiet, shaded residential neighborhood. After parking in his side yard and visiting on the covered porch, there was always a work or two in progress to view in the studio and usually some new exhibition catalogues or international art magazines to review. In addition to art, there was always something to discuss related to the history of the Savannah River Valley and Rice’s study of the geography and archeology of the region, which informed and inspired his art. It was common to hold a shell, a shard, a broken blade or some remnant of that regional history, a literal touchstone to the past. Some days, as the talk progressed and the day grew long, it felt like a studio from an earlier era. Time passed rapidly in Ed’s studio.

The Morris Museum of Art acquired one of Rice’s iconic early works, Dormer, painted from direct observation of an historic downtown building dormer over a period of three years (1984-87) in his Eight Street studio. From that former studio site, located only a few blocks from the museum, one could still study the dormer and rooflines that Rice obsessed over those years. In this, as in so many other works of this period, it was common for Rice to spend two to three years in the creation of a work, capturing every detail and nuance of light and atmosphere in his architectural and landscape paintings. I asked Rice to show me these sites--and he did, very generously. One such site, located on the Georgia side of the Savannah River, served as the source and inspiration for a painting, The River (1994), a work we acquired for the Morris Museum that year. It was painted over a two-year period, largely on the site, requiring the artist to haul the canvas, his easel and related equipment, by cart, through the rugged woods overlooking the river. (5)

As his career progressed during the 1990s, so did the evolution of the Morris Museum. Rice was an active participant in museum programs from an early date, including his role in training docents and offering public lectures, as well as being engaged in the opening of exhibitions and visiting artists’ presentations. He met, and befriended, many of the national artists we brought to the museum, often for exhibitions and projects I organized, including artists like William Christenberry, Benny Andrews, Wolf Kahn, Robert Stackhouse, Robert Rauschenberg and others. And, he always seemed to observe and absorb lessons from them, gauging his work and vision, watching as they responded to his environment. As he recently affirmed, this was an important period for his enhanced appreciation of contemporary art and the evolution of his own work.

Rice regularly joined me, and served as our museum tour guide, in organizing memorable explorations of the Augusta region for visiting Southern artists and their guests. For example, when William Christenberry came to Augusta in 1996, for the opening of his exhibition, William Christenberry: The Early Years, 1954-1968, we rented a passenger van for the artist, his family and guests and planned an extensive day tour, led by Rice, of South Carolina sites including Aiken, Edgefield, North Augusta and Graniteville, focusing on architecture and history, including the small and haunting Graniteville graveyard (where Rice is currently painting again). Christenberry and his guests treasured that tour and their experiences in those charged Southern places, and offered to share their own tours, of their places, with Rice. Christenberry and Rice also shared a specific interest in Southern vernacular architecture, especially the endangered structures that were increasingly disappearing across the region. In numerous ways, Rice gained exposure to significant artists, scholars and curators through the opening of the new museum, and they, in turn, gained access to him and an appreciation of his work.

By 1996, the issue of the extensive periods of time (often years) and intensive labor devoted to his work was a topic we increasingly discussed in the studio. One day, I recall asking, finally, what his “Abstract Expressionist” phase might be like—what would happen if he just painted--fast and directly, without the detailed, carefully measured, heavily labored approach he still maintained. Some time after that conversation, Rice called and asked me to come to the studio, soon if I could. I did. And, to my surprise, there, on a large easel was a new painting, Birdhouse, a gloriously painted and color-filled work, one that was still charged with the energy Rice had invested in it and its heavily textured surface. He completed the work in a remarkably short and intensive period of time, for him, and it had come out full and complete. But he was not sure what to think. Could it be good art, he wondered, if he had not invested months of labor and worry in it? I tried to assure him that what he suspected was true—it was a major breakthrough. It was followed by paintings of shotgun houses and familiar landscapes, some labored, others more rapidly executed—created on site and in the studio.

Recognizing the direction his work was taking and considering the artist’s interest in the repetition of imagery, I offered the suggestion that Rice consider working with noted regional printmaker Wayne Kline, the founder and Tamarind-trained master printer of Rolling Stone Press in Atlanta. In this period, I had organized an exhibition and worked with Kline and a number of his studio artists, and quickly came to admire his seriousness, technical proficiency and collaborative nature. Rice, who had produced only one fine art print to that date—a monotype, based upon his Fig Tree series created with Patrick Lindhardt at the Ringling School [OR: College] of Art and Design in 1990--seemed to have an artistic disposition and technical curiosity similar to Kline’s. After meeting in Atlanta in 1996, they agreed to collaborate, making a print series based upon the painting, Birdhouse. It was an aesthetic and technical turning point for Rice, who enjoyed the collaborative process with Kline, and who learned about the use of color on flat planes in ways that influenced his later paintings. As he recently noted, this experience also opened the way for his later monotypes, a series and process he initiated in 2002-2003 with Phillip Garrett at King Snake Press in Greenville, S.C., and continues to the present date.(6)


In the spring of 1998, when we invited artist Wolf Kahn to the Morris Museum of Art and Augusta to explore the creation of a major painting for the museum, I asked Edward Rice to join us and to help plan our landscape and architectural expedition through the Savannah River region. Over a period of days, following Rice’s plan, we toured the headwaters of the Augusta Canal, where Kahn sketched vernacular wooden gate houses; the historic Ezekiel Harris House, which he sketched in the Harrisburg section of Augusta; Redcliffe Plantation near Beech Island in South Carolina; a range of pecan orchards and peanut plantation facilities in Burke County, Georgia, marked by barns and warehouses Kahn liked; and finally, we discovered his favored subject. It was an abandoned and strikingly organic cotton barn, located in a grove of trees behind the Beech Island Historical Society in South Carolina.

Throughout this research and sketching project, Rice watched as Kahn worked rapidly and directly, responding to the landscape and architectural subjects he encountered. We watched as Kahn’s pastels moved at great speed, creating images capturing the color and spirit of a lush spring environment in the South--a landscape that was familiar to Rice, but now was seen through the eyes of an American master. Kahn readily discussed color, color theory, technique, art history and American history, described his love of vernacular architecture and the South, all while working in a focused, highly productive way. From this field research, Kahn produced a body of pastels and painted studies, culminating in a major painting acquired by the museum, Cotton Barn at Beech Island, SC, which served as the focus of an exhibition and publication documenting the process Rice had witnessed. (7)

Ten years later, in the fall of 2008, Edward Rice still recalls the importance of those experiences with Wolf Kahn, and remembers how they influenced the evolution of his own work. He was impressed by Kahn’s direct response to the historic Ezekiel Harris House, a familiar subject for Rice, particularly how Kahn “went straight to what needed to be done.” He was taken by Kahn’s assured hand, and his abilities with color, form and sense of marking a surface. It was, above all, the immediacy and directness of his approach that he recalls today, including the older artist’s use of light, color and shape. (8) And, though never mentioned by Rice, there may have been some reflection of the assuredness and skill he learned from the hand and field experiences taught him by Freeman Schoolcraft in and around Augusta. For Rice, one direct response to his experience with Kahn was his creation of a series of nine rapidly executed barn studies, each a variation on the same subject matter, dedicated to exploring color possibilities.

Rice, who had studied as a child at the Gertrude Herbert Institute, then later became its Director, retained a close association with this historic Augusta art school and gallery. When my wife, Sharon, was appointed to serve as Director there in 1995, assuming the position once held by Rice, he was expansive in his support and willingness to share his understanding of the institution and its history, including its role as one of the primary teaching institutions in the region. In 1998, in recognition of Rice’s seminal role in the art world of Augusta, and at the Gertrude Herbert, a retrospective exhibition was organized by David Houston, then Director of the Rudolph E. Lee Gallery at Clemson University, for presentation in the Lee Gallery at Clemson, at the Gertrude Herbert and at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston (a city where Rice has worked extensively). Houston then noted that “Rice’s mature work may be understood as the synthesis of representation and subjectivity,” and offered the following conclusion. “Ultimately, the subjectivity of these works undercuts their ascendancy toward the archetypal, resulting in paintings that are precisely what they appear to be, yet also undefinably something else.” (9)

The art of Edward Rice was marked by a series of evolutionary transformations in the years from 1995 to 1998, reflected in the range and nature of the works featured in the Gertrude Herbert exhibition, Edward Rice: Architectural Works, 1978-1998, as well as in his approach to printmaking and his less formal, more rapidly executed works of this era. Looking back to this evolving period in Rice’s work in 2003, David Houston, writing for the exhibition catalogue Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes, observed that in “the late nineties, Rice was painting his most confident work ever. Working primarily with architectural subjects and landscapes, his new work was more spontaneous and luminous than ever, and it successfully struck a balance between the accumulation of small details and an overall formal generalization.” (10)

After leaving Augusta and the Morris Museum of Art in the fall of 1999 to assume the position of director of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, I continued to follow the evolution of Rice’s career. His respect for Freeman Schoolcraft and his mentor’s under-appreciated career had touched me as well, as had visits with Cora Schoolcraft in the Schoolcraft home and studio, when Cora was still living there. In 2000, after settling in New Orleans, I completed a research and exhibition project with Edward Rice, Morris Museum of Art director Keith Claussen and research associate Karen Klacsmann, titled “Freeman and Cora Schoolcraft: A Tribute,” featuring the paintings and studies Rice and I had selected from the family home and estate, with support from Faye Schoolcraft and Ann Schoolcraft Cook. This exhibition, with accompanying publication, opened at the Morris Museum of Art in June of 2000.(11)

After David Houston left Clemson University to move to New Orleans, where he became the chief curator at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, we encouraged Rice to expand his sketching trips to include New Orleans, a city he had studied in the past. That led to trips to New Orleans, where Rice sketched and photographed the architecture of the French Quarter and other historic neighborhoods. In 2002, his work was included in an exhibition at the museum’s Julia Street gallery, Art in the South: Recent Acquisitions and Projects. When the Ogden Museum celebrated the grand opening of its new building, Stephen Goldring Hall, in August of 2003, Rice was a featured artist and an active participant in the week-long series of programs, artist conversations and related events.(12) Over the course of the next year, Rice returned to New Orleans, including an extended stay in the studio of New Orleans artist Amy Weiskopf (then working in Italy), completing studies for a 2004 one-man exhibition of his work at Marguerite Oestreicher Fine Arts in New Orleans. This exhibition, devoted to the architecture of New Orleans, brought increased attention to his art in the city.

The understanding, appreciation and collecting of Southern art has undergone a profound transformation since Edward Rice began his path to becoming a professional artist in the South during the 1970s. Augusta, a colonial city, did not have a fine arts museum until 1992, when the Morris Museum of Art opened, the first museum dedicated to the art of the South. In the fall of 1999, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art opened a transitional gallery on Julia Street; its permanent home opened in August of 2003. The growth of collecting and exhibiting Southern art became increasingly evident during the 1980s and 1990s at South Carolina’s Greenville County Museum of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C.,the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Ga., and other institutions across the region. Rice is now represented in the permanent collections of most of these museums, as well as in private and corporate collections across the South.(13)

From 1993 to 2008, the art of Edward Rice achieved growing regional, national and international recognition. Exhibitions at museums and galleries, accompanied by catalogues and critical reviews, documented the evolution of his career. During these years, he traveled nationally and internationally, actively sketching, studying and photographing the cities and regions he visited. He spent an increasing amount of time in County Cork, Ireland, where he and Anna El Gammal built a house and studio, and his work reflected a growing appreciation of the architecture of Ireland. They also traveled regularly to cities including London, Rome and Antwerp. During the past decade, as Edward Rice’s travels and vision expanded, his art began to transcend the specific realities of his earlier work—striving for mood, memory and emotion—rather than the exact details, precise draftsmanship and historic accuracy that once marked his work. Despite the frequency and extent of his travels, Rice always welcomes his return home, to Augusta and North Augusta, to the studio where he expects to work, as he recently noted, “until the end of my days.” Back where he started.

J. Richard Gruber, Ph.D.
Director
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
University of New Orleans



1. David Houston, “The Architectural Works of Edward Rice,” in Edward Rice, Architectural Works: 1978-1998 (Augusta: Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, 1998), 13.
2. Ibid, 13.
3. For a more detailed consideration of Schoolcraft and his career, as well as his influence upon Edward Rice, see J. Richard Gruber, “Freeman Schoolcraft: Chicago, Santa Fe and Augusta,” in Freeman and Cora Schoolcraft: A Tribute (Augusta: Morris Museum of Art, 2000), 3-23.
4. Houston, 15. He also divorced Schoolcraft’s daughter, Faye Schoolcraft, in this same year, but always maintained close ties to the Schoolcraft family.
5. See J. Richard Gruber, “The Twentieth Century: Selected Acquisitions,” in 5th Anniversary: Celebrating Southern Art (Augusta: Morris Museum of Art, 1997), 33-34.
6. See Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes (Augusta: Morris Museum of Art, 2003), 5, 9-10, 11-12, 13.
7. See J. Richard Gruber, Wolf Kahn: Painting the South (Augusta: Morris Museum of Art, 1999).
8. Interview with Edward Rice, October 12, 2008.
9. Houston, 21.
10. David Houston, “Edward Rice,” in Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes, 11-12.
11. See Gruber, “Freeman Schoolcraft: Chicago, Santa Fe and Augusta,” in Freeman and Cora Schoolcraft: A Tribute.
12. See J. Richard Gruber and David Houston, The Art of the South: 1890-2003, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art (London: Scala Publishers Ltd, 2003), 6, 73.
13. Ibid, 9-21.

Edward Rice: A Chronology

Compiled by Wim Roefs

October 2008


1953

Born in North Augusta, SC, to Patrick W. Rice and Jane Barnes Rice alongside twin brother Patrick, a musician. Brother Matthew, b. 1957, is an architect; brother John, b. 1959, a cabinetmaker.

1963 – 1966

Takes drawing and watercolor lessons from Edith Alexander in North Augusta, and paints Camellia. Takes painting lessons from Louise Mallard at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, Ga.

1970

Creates his first architectural drawings and watercolors, mostly as commissions and mostly of houses in his hometown. He’ll continue to do small, local commissions for small amounts for years.

His English teacher at North Augusta High School, commissions him to do a pen-and-ink drawing of Reims Cathedral.

1971

Voted “most talented class of 1971” at North Augusta High. The school’s yearbook included an image of Rice next to one of his paintings, playing a guitar. During the school’s annual Evening with the Arts, Rice won several blue ribbons, including one for a mobile made of bottles.

His English teacher requires him to paint a portrait of 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in lieu of his senior term paper.


1971 – 1976

Performs regionally as a professional musician with his twin brother as The Rice Brothers. A 1973 concert at Augusta College, Augusta, Ga., draws a rave review in the Augusta College Bell Ringer of January 12. The Rice Brothers are real “artists instead of (just) technicians,” the review proclaims, singling out the brothers’ song Napalm for special praise.

1972

Is assistant archeological illustrator at the Chieftains Dig in Rome, Ga.

1972 – 1974

Studies at Augusta College with Freeman Schoolcraft, David Jones and Eugenia Comer until Schoolcraft retires.

1974

Begins five years of private instruction from Freeman Schoolcraft and spends a month with Schoolcraft in New Mexico, painting landscape and cityscape watercolors.

Wins Best in Show award at the Augusta Arts Festival.

1975

Marries Faye Schoolcraft and lives at 205 Summit Ave. in North Augusta, where he has a studio.

Has his first solo exhibition, at the Augusta – Richmond County Library in Augusta, showing watercolors of local architecture.

Receives small monthly stipend from Chicago patron Betty Hall, which will continue until her death in 1982.

1976

Visits Washington, D.C., and New York City, where he studies old masters and contemporary art in museums and galleries and develops a special interest in Edward Hopper and Jan Vermeer.

His Corner on Green Street is on the cover of Brown’s Guide to Georgia’s September–October issue.

1977

Travels through Europe for three months; in Siena, Italy, becomes fascinated with the Lorenzetti Brothers’ 14th-century fresco Allegory of Good and Bad Government.

Has exhibition with Faye Schoolcraft at St. Paul’s Church, Augusta.

1978

Has a month-long residency in Charleston, SC, creating watercolors and drawings of the city, and has a solo exhibition at the Dock Street Theater. His watercolors and drawings were priced from $125 – $375.

Meets Massachusetts collector Edwin Jaffe, who becomes an important early patron.

Is selected for the 4th Annual Seibels, Bruce Caroliniana Water Color Competition at the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC. Rice’s View From James Island was priced at $600. Others selected included Ray Davenport, Dorothy Candy Yaghjian, Mana Hewitt, Gill Petroff, Alex Powers, Guy Lipscomb and Blue Sky.


1979

Moves his residency and studio to Augusta’s Gertrude Herbert Institute, where he is appointed director and artist-in-residence, teaches painting until 1993 and organizes exhibitions of works by Freeman Schoolcraft, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner and Georgia artists Lamar Wood, Paul Vincent and Jackson Cheatham. Also organized an exhibition of works by University of South Carolina art department seniors.

Is included in Gallery Artists, Exhibitors Gallery, Charleston, SC.

Wins first place in the Augusta Art Association Exhibition, Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, for Sixth Street.


1980

Studies mechanical drawing at Aiken Technical College, Aiken, SC.

Is profiled in the March/April issue of Art Voices South by his wife, Faye Schoolcraft, who discussed Rice’s late-1970s tendency to juxtapose in his paintings, among them Sixth Street, early Victorian architecture with looming examples of international style architecture, reflecting architectural changes in many Southern towns. “At present my work is a result of my fascination for the place in which I live,” Rice told his wife. “I carry a certain idea in mind that is inspired by direct experience… A painting interests me as non-representational form, color, pattern and also as expression. Form, color, and texture, for me, are means to an end.” Concept and expression are more important to Rice than faithful representation of a subject, Schoolcraft wrote.

Travels to Spain for a month, studying Francisco Goya, Diego Velasquez and El Greco as well as Roman ruins.

1981

Is included in the Art and Georgia Exhibition, Albany Museum of Art, Albany, Ga.; Freeman Schoolcraft, Paul Vincent and Edward Rice, Cheatham Gallery, Thomson, Ga.; and Watercolor: Southeast at the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center in Largo, Fla., curated by Philip Pearlstein, with Rice’s watercolor Over 13th, 22 x 30 inches, priced at $500.

Says in an interview with Augusta Magazine’s Winter issue: “I was drawing when I was two. By the time I was six, I was getting art supplies for Christmas presents. When I was eight, I took art lessons here at the Gertrude Herbert (Institute of Art).” In the four or five years he performed with twin brother Pat, Rice practiced music for four hours in the morning and painted in the afternoon. He lives in the area, Rice told the magazine, because it’s part of him and visually interesting to him. “I’m an independent artist… I work alone. When people ask me what kind of people are in Augusta I have to say I don’t know because I don’t really ever see people. If I lived in a larger place I would just have that many more people to be independent of.”

Makes the headlines when the Augusta Chronicle of July 22 proclaims: “Artist, 28, decides to paint scene for himself.” The article reported that “after eight years as an artist for hire, Ed Rice finally is taking time to paint something for himself.” Deciding to get away from commissions, Rice decided a year earlier to paint Lunch, of three women having lunch. “I am approaching 30 and I wanted to do something that’s the very best I can do without it being on a time limit and within a budget,” Rice said.

Gives a lecture on Edgar Degas at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art.

Travels to Chicago, Ill., and Washington, D.C.

Teaches at John S. Davidson Fine Arts School in Augusta.

1982

Resigns as director of the Gertrude Herbert Institute to become a full-time painter, but continues to teach at the institute.

Spends a month in San Francisco.

Gets a divorce from Faye Schoolcraft.

Begins his first mature architectural paintings, a series of four-foot-square paintings of local houses.

Moves his studio to 142 Eighth St. in Augusta.


1983

Is selected for the Biennial Exhibition of Piedmont Painting and Sculpture at The Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, with his 1982 oil painting Lunch, which he started in 1979. Others selected included Alice Ballard-Munn, Raymond Chorneau and Herb Jackson.

Moves his studio to 20 Eighth St., near that of painter Berry Fleming, with whom Rice often has pancakes on Saturday morning at the Uptowner motel, and whose easel he received after Fleming’s death in 1989.

Paints for two weeks in Massachusetts as the guest of collector Edwin Jaffe and receives a commission from Augusta collector Carlton Duvall.

Meets his current partner, Anna El Gammal.

His mentor, Freeman Schoolcraft, dies.

Is the co-curator for a Freeman Schoolcraft exhibition at NEXUS in Atlanta, Ga.


1984

Travels to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Mexico and Arizona.

Is included in the South Carolina Arts Commission 1984 Annual Exhibition at the Rudolph E. Lee Gallery at Clemson University, Clemson, SC Rice’s oil painting Lunch is priced at $5,500, Walker and 2nd (unfinished), at $2,500. Others in the show included John Acorn, Heidi Darr-Hope, Philip Garrett, Jesse Guinyard Jr., Steven Hewitt, Ann McAden, Matt Overend and Howard Woody.

Wins the $2,500 Purchase Award, Best of Show, at the 26th annual Springs Traveling Art Show: Art Of The Carolinas with 125 ½ Walker Street, an oil painting on panel. “I was immediately impressed with this piece and kept coming back to it again and again,” wrote juror Nicolai Cikovsky, curator of American Art, The National Gallery, Washington, D.C. “It has a fine sense of scale, of design and color. I was attracted by its sincerity and sensitivity.” The other winners were Robert Graham, Steven R. Miller, Robert Doster, Jean McWorter and Robert Mayberry Jr. The exhibition opened at the Rutledge Gallery at Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC, and traveled in South Carolina to Spartanburg and Columbia, and in North Carolina, to Charlotte, Jacksonville, Lenoir and Winston-Salem.

1985

Is among 38 artists in Artists in Georgia: 1985 at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens.

Writes an essay about his mentor Freeman Schoolcraft (1905–1983) for Freeman Schoolcraft, which he organized. The show opened at Augusta’s Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in January 1986.

Receives $750 as the first-prize winner with 111 Telfair Street at the National Bank of South Carolina Oil Painters’ Invitational at the Sumter Gallery of Art, Sumter, SC. The painting was priced at $4,000. Other winners included Carl Blair, Stephen Chesley, Mana Hewitt and Matt Overend.

First of annual study trips to Washington, D.C., and New York City.


1986

Is included in South Carolina: The State Of The Arts – An Invitational/Juried Exhibition at the Columbia Museum of Art. Others in the exhibition included Sigmund Abeles, J. Bardin, Tarleton Blackwell, Robert Courtright, William Halsey, Jasper Johns, Mana Hewett, Lee Malerich, Edmund Lewandowski, James Lewis & Clark Ellefson, Corrie McCallum, Linda McCune, Philip Mullen, Alex Powers, Arthur Rose, Boyd Saunders, Merton Simpson, Maxwell Taylor, Leo Twiggs and Michael Tyzack.

Is included in Dealer’s Choice, Columbia Museum of Art; Visual Arts: The Southeast, One Security Center, Atlanta; and the Mid America Biennial at the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art in Owensboro, Ky., where Rice’s oil painting Lunch was priced $7,500.


1987

Is featured in the March¬–April issue of Southern Accents in anticipation of his solo show at the University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum in Columbia. “I’ve taken typically clichéd Southern realist images and tried to do them in a serious painterly manner,” Rice told the magazine. He deals with “questions of values. Why is this house suitable for this person and that one for someone else? Through my paintings of houses I want to create social commentary addressed to the world, but very much from Augusta’s point of view.”

Edward Rice: Paintings and Drawings, at the University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum, contains 15 paintings and 42 drawings. The works were of a variety of houses, most painted straight on, in Augusta and North Augusta, and many of the paintings were 48 x 48 inches. “The results have the solidity of Byzantine art and the Surrealist sense of time taken out of time,” museum director Lynn Robertson Myers wrote in the catalogue. “I am not a photo realist,” Rice told Myers, “the composition and the drawing are done first, then I photograph, using whatever lens I need to get that format.”

Catalogue essayist Peter Morrin, a former curator of contemporary art at Atlanta’s High Museum who recently had become director of the J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., wrote that in Rice’s house paintings “there is always a note of authenticity which redeems both Victorian Queen Anne pretensions and humble bungalows, and which is transmitted through an interlocking system of geometrical relationships…Ennobling the mundane carries a heavy risk of romanticization, but Rice evades that danger through the sheer authority of his technique.” The humble tin-roof dwelling, Rice told curator Morrin, “is one of the quintessential Southern clichés and a favorite theme of the worst sort of hack realism. Therein lies its particular challenge. It was my intention to create honest images free of incorrect and immoral associations.” Reviewer Janet A. Tomlinson, writing in the July/August issue of Art Papers, was not fond of Lunch but more impressed with Rice’s architectural paintings, which allow the viewer “to appreciate the distance the young artist has journeyed” over nine years. “Ironically,’ Tomlinson wrote, “Rice’s figures have far less personality than the buildings and places.”

Is profiled in the May–June issue of Augusta Magazine on the occasion of his show at the McKissick Museum. Within the context of his hands-on approach to the show, Rice illustrated his pickiness: “When I was three or four years old, I had to have waxed leather shoe laces. I wanted the loops to stand out parallel to the ground, perfectly straight. I could not stand to have them flopping.” His work “is about a lot of things,” Rice told the magazine. “There are all these things that are square, or geometric; a building that is lost to a parking lot; the idea of a single dwelling; the Anglo-Saxon house of 700 A.D., the Victorian basement with its scullery, cutlery room, larder. All these things are in my mind when I do a painting.” Behind Rice’s “impish grin and quiet demeanor,” author Keith Claussen wrote, “you’ll find an almost encyclopedic mind that seems to absorb everything.”

Is included in South Carolina Realism at the Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC, and Small Scale at the Heath Gallery in Atlanta. Also in the Greenville show were Darrell Koons, West Fraser and Jim Harrison. Rice is the maverick of the bunch, the Greenville Piedmont reported June 8. In the South, Rice told the paper, “one of the dominant themes you see in the worst kind of amateur show would be a small house on the side of the road with the tin roof, that sort of thing.” It’s not for him, Rice said. “One of my goals is to try to produce the thinking man’s popular art, which is probably a ridiculous goal.”


Travels to Ireland and England and studies Lucian Freud’s work.


1988

Is awarded one of three South Carolina Art Commission Visual Arts and Crafts Fellowships. The other two fellows that year were Scott Belville and Lee Malerich.

Is one of 20 artists awarded a Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Regional Visual Arts Fellowship.

Is selected for the January–March 1988 Mint Museum Biennial, Charlotte, NC. Others selected include Maud Gatewood, Richard Stenhouse and Bob Trotman. Rice’s oil on canvas 110 Briggs, 1985-86, receives a Juror’s Merit Award. The painting does not impress reviewer Dennis Szakacs, who in the September issue of New Art Examiner called the work an example of “overly romanticized inklings of Southern living…” The painting is, according to the reviewer, “a tediously composed version of a middle-class Southern bungalow dappled in sunlight. All this idyllic stereotype lacks is some moss hanging from the rambling tree in front of the house.”

Is the instructor for a seminar on how to buy art at Augusta College.

Is included in A Realistic View at The Davenport Gallery in Greenville, SC, and Somewhere in Between, Waterworks Visual Arts Center, Salisbury, NC.

Is included in the May–June issue of Augusta Magazine as one of the Georgia city’s up and comers under 40.

Travels in Mexico.

Begins a series of paintings focused on a fig tree behind his studio.


1989

Is in a traveling exhibition of 20 Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Regional Visual Arts Fellowship winners at the Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, the Louisiana Arts and Science Center in Baton Rouge and the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla. The Atlanta Journal/Constitution reviewer on June 19 wrote that Rice “submitted an atypical and unexciting painting of tree branches.”

Is included in the South Carolina Arts Commission Exhibition, South Carolina State Museum, Columbia, SC.

Is profiled favorably in the October issue of New Art Examiner by David Houston, then Director of Visual Arts for the South Carolina Arts Commission, as part of the publication’s Southern Arts Federation Supplement. The supplement is published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of 20 SAF/National Endowment for the Arts Regional Visual Arts Fellowship winners, including Rice. Houston called Rice’s art “a search for an authentic path for illusionistic painting informed by place and time. Like figurative artists Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, Rice is obsessive in his attempt to recreate…the complexity of the subject/object relationship that constitutes seeing… Rice’s poetry of the familiar is closer to epistemological investigation than the demands of the market.”

Tells the Augusta Chronicle: “We all have doubts about what we do. Artistically, I want my work to be more necessary. Good art is necessary for civilization. Mediocre art is not.”

Travels for three weeks in France, studying old masters at the Louvre and prehistoric cave paintings.

Begins work on a series of landscape paintings and a series of figure paintings, using a single model.

1990

Edward Rice: Tree Paintings opens in January at Heath Gallery in Atlanta, and in May travels to Augusta’s Gertrude Herbert Institute. The exhibition contains 21 paintings of the same fig tree outside of Rice’s studio, all painted in the previous two years. “In an age of hand-held remotes…” curator Jon Myers of South Carolina’s Clemson University wrote in the show’s catalogue, “Edward Rice wants us to return to looking – and really seeing…” Detecting the influence of painters such as Lucian Freud, Neal Welliver, Jim Dine, Jan Baptist Weenix, Vincent van Gogh and Frans Hals, Myers wrote: “These paintings are obsessively designed by Rice, much to his credit… This is an act of analysis far beyond painting.” In the June 28 edition of Carolina Extra, published by The Augusta Chronicle, Rice likens his exercise in repetition to “a guy playing a solo on the saxophone. He can play the same solo over and over, but each time make it a little different – like more sad or more soulful or more alert.” Saying that his popular architectural work has been received coolly by critics, Rice said that the tree paintings were “definitely directed towards a more critical audience. I would love to do popular images in a way that critics would appreciate, but that’s extremely rare.”

Is represented in the South Carolina Arts & Crafts Fellows Retrospective 1970–1990 at the South Carolina State Museum. The exhibition provided a survey of work by South Carolina Arts Commission fellows. Rice’s works in the show were the oil painting 923 Telfair, 1982-85, on loan from Bankers First, Augusta, and Mausoleum, 1989-90, on loan from the South Carolina Arts Commission State Art Collection.

Is among 40 artists in Selections from the State Art Collection of the South Carolina Arts Commission at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC. Others in the show included Beverly Buchanan, Jeri Burdick, Bruno Civitico, Jasper Johns, Phil Moody, Philip Mullen, Jorge Otero, Leo Twiggs and Edmund Yaghjian.

Is included in Artists in Georgia, Albany Museum of Art.

Becomes a member of the board of trustees of Augusta’s Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art until 1996.

Creates his first print, a monotype, with Patrick Lindhardt at the Ringling College of Art and Design, where Rice was a visiting artist.

1991

Is included in The Cow Show at the Madison Morgan Cultural Center in Madison, Ga.; South Carolina Contemporary Images, Owensboro Museum of Art; Gallery Artists, Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, NC; LaGrange National XVI, Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum, La Grange, Ga.; Preview: Art and Design in Winthrop Galleries, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC; and Southern Landscapes: Past and Present and Spoleto Show, Jean Spedden Gallery, Charleston, SC; others in the latter exhibition included Stephen Chesley, Linda Fantuzzo, Manning Williams, Michael Tyzack and Edward Wimberly.

Is among 16 artists in Selections From The State Art Collection of South Carolina at Augusta’s Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art. Other artists included Sigmund Abeles, Bruno Civitico, Robert Courtright, Merton Simpson, Edward Wimberly and Edmund Yaghjian. “The infusion of classical balance and harmony in Rice’s Mausoleum,” Harriett Green, then the SC Arts Commission’s assistant visual arts director, wrote, “and the precision of execution in his technique speaks to the simplicity and grandeur which is typical of his depiction of southern edifices.”

1992

Edward Rice: Unshown Works is at the Morris Gallery in Columbia, SC. Rice showed 23 works, including oil canvases from 12 x 12 inches up to 48 x 48 inches, pencil and charcoal drawings and a lithograph. Rice is “charmingly old fashioned in an oddly contemporary way,” David Houston, then director of Clemson University’s gallery, said in the March 1 issue of Columbia’s The State newspaper. Rice himself told the paper: “The idea was that these are paintings of subjects frequently chosen by hacks: girls on the beach, large pine tree at sunset. Most serious artists don’t do those things… When I used to paint a tree it was very factual. Now even though it’s halfway made up in a sense, it’s more factual to me. It’s more of the experience of the tree.”

Has a solo exhibition at Hampton III Gallery in Greenville, SC.

Is included in South Carolina Expressions, Columbia Museum of Art, and among 58 artists in South Carolina/Kentucky Exchange at the South Carolina State Museum. Other South Carolina artists in the latter show included Sara Ayers, Tarleton Blackwell, Richard Burnside, Stephen Chesley, Heidi Darr-Hope, Tom Flowers, Phil Garrett, Jean Grosser, Matt Overend and Manning Williams.

Returns to architecture as his main focus as a painter while continuing figure and landscape paintings.

1993

In a profile in Aiken County Magazine, Rice says: “I used to think that artists just took their paints and went looking for a subject, but that’s not how I work. Usually I just see something that gives me an idea, and it might stay in my mind, or as a sketch on a canvas, for years until I actually work on it… As a kid I used to sketch houses, and then got more serious about it. I sold sketches for $5 or $10 to earn money as a teenager, instead of getting a job like other kids.”

Has a solo exhibition at the Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum in La Grange, Ga.

Is included in Drawings and Watercolors, a four-person show at Ergo Sum Gallery in Augusta; The Eye’s Moment at Meteor Gallery, Columbia, SC, with Brian Rust and Paul Bright and five other artists; The Discerning Spirit at the Old Government House in Augusta with James Rosen and Kathleen Girdler-Engler; and The Artist As Native: Reinventing Regionalism, organized by Babcock Galleries, New York City, at the Albany Institute of History & Art, Albany, NY, with some 50 other artists. Among those in the latter exhibition were Nell Blaine, Paul Resika and Vincent Smith.

Resigns from teaching at the Gertrude Herbert Institute.

Travels to The Netherlands, Belgium and Mexico.

1994

Is included in Vividly Told: Contemporary Southern Narrative Painting, Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, which travels to Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art. Rice was represented with 502 Lucerne Street, an oil painting on canvas from the collection of the Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum. About the painting, curator Estill Curtis Pennington of the Morris Museum wrote: “Ed Rice’s grandmother sits in a yard in North Augusta with a wistful vacant stare.” Others in the exhibition included Tarleton Blackwell, Virginia Derryberry, William Dunlap, Kate Kretz and Manning Williams.

Is included in Oil on Canvas: Looking at the Artist’s Process and Vividly Told, Morris Museum of Art; A Sense of Place, Zone One Gallery, Asheville, NC; and Lure of the Lowcountry, at the Gibbes Museum of Art with The Canoeist, 1993, and The Clay Cliff, 1991-92. Others in the latter exhibition included J. Bardin, Stephen Chesley, Linda Fantuzzo, William Halsey, Edwin Harleston, Edward Hopper, Alfred Hutty, William H. Johnson, Corrie McCallum, Matt Overend, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Brian Rutenberg and Elizabeth O’Neill Verner.

Travels to San Francisco, Santa Fe, NM, and Mexico.

1995

Serves on the committee for Augusta Collects 19th and 20th Century Painting, Morris Museum of Art.

Travels in Italy, visiting Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan and Urbino.

1996

Is featured in the Art Now Gallery Guide Southeast, including on the cover, in anticipation of exhibitions at Hampton III Gallery and the Greenville County Museum of Art, both in Greenville, SC.

Edward Rice: Recent Architectural Paintings, is at Hampton III Gallery.

Edward Rice: Recent Figure Paintings, is at Greenville County Museum of Art.

Is among approximately 70 artists in Rediscovering The Landscape Of The Americas at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. Others in the show included Willie Birch, Nell Blaine, Richard Estes, Janet Fish, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Hunt Slonem and Neil Welliver. The exhibition travels to the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, the Western Gallery at Western Washington University in Bellington, WA, the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, and Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art. An article on the exhibition in the January-February issue of Southern Accents featured an image of Rice’s painting The Fence, 1996.

Is included in Survivals, Revivals & Arrivals: Contemporary Art From The Central Savannah River Area, Getrude Herbert Institute of Art, with Mausoleum, 1989, on loan from the South Carolina State Art Collection; Looking at the Contemporary Southern Artist, Morris Museum of Art; and Fish Swim In The Lake, Winthrop University Galleries, Rock Hill, SC, with, among others, Thornton Dial, Deanna Leamon, Peter Lenzo and Jim Steven. “The most traditional (paintings),” the Charlotte Observer’s Tom Patterson wrote on September 22, “are three lushly painted, back-lighted images of voluptuous nude women by Ed Rice… In the indirect light, their skin glows in almost surreal shades of red, lavender and blue-green.”

In October chairs A Fall Affair, the sixth annual fundraiser for Augusta’s Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art.

Produces a lithograph, Birdhouse, with Wayne Kline, Rolling Stone Press, in Atlanta; creates his only sculpture, a bird house, as a study for the lithograph.

Acts as tour guide for artist William Christenberry during a day trip through the area around Aiken and North Augusta, SC.

Travels to Philadelphia, Pa., Santa Fe, NM, England and Ireland.


1997

Is included in Gallery Artists, Hodges Taylor Gallery; Selections from the South Carolina Arts Commission State Art Collection: 1988 – 1995, Franklin G. Burroughs–Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum, Myrtle Beach, SC; and Celebrating Sixty Years, The Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art.

Is discussed in 5th Anniversary: Celebrating Southern Art, published by Augusta’s Morris Museum of Art. The publication includes an image of The River, 1994, along with images of works by Robert Rauschenberg, Ida Kohlmeyer, John Steuart Curry, William Christenberry, Jasper Johns, Herb Jackson and Benny Andrews.

In May holds an open house in his new and newly renovated studio on Lucerne Avenue in North Augusta. The building, built about 1940, originally was the city’s jail, which Rice’s grandfather moved to the Lucerne location and turned into a retirement cottage.

1998

Is included in the South Carolina Triennial, an overview of contemporary art at the South Carolina State Museum. Of Presbyterian, 1998, which he later repainted and re-titled Spire, Rice said in the catalogue: “I chose to depict this particular building, not because I admire it…but because I find its particular architectural realization thought provoking.” The museum purchased Presbyterian II.

Edward Rice: New Architectural Paintings is at Greenville’s Hampton III Gallery.

Edward Rice: Architectural Works 1978 – 1988 opens in October at Clemson’s University’s Rudolph E. Lee Gallery, Clemson, SC, accompanied by an 80-page catalogue with 19 color plates by the same title, published by the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art. Clemson’s David Houston is the curator. The exhibition travels to Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art and the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art. Placing Rice’s work within the context of the resurgence of realist painting in American art, curator Houston wrote in the catalogue: “Although the development of the new realism made the critical climate more receptive to realist painting, Rice’s anachronistic realism was largely untouched by the conceptual element in late modern art; it also lacked the irony, revivalism and media consciousness associated with Postmodernism.” South Carolina State University art historian Frank Martin wrote in the February 21, 1999, issue of the Charleston Post and Courier: “Edward Rice can make buildings speak, he can reveal their souls…” Rice’s buildings don’t only speak but tell “an extraordinary story, or more precisely, several different stories…” The work transcends formal concerns and regionalism, Martin wrote. In the paintings “the human condition is symbolically treated via a narrowly considered thematic device of investigating man-made structures.” Rice “creates works that are simultaneously firmly rooted in reality and the present, quietly revealing concern with issues of social change.” Speaking to the Augusta Chronicle for its March 21 issue, Rice said about his painting Public Housing, in which a law enforcement center looms over public housing: “I added a couple of floors to make it a little more dramatic.”

Is included in Celebrating the Art of the South: A Fifth Anniversary Exhibition, Morris Museum of Art.

Serves as a location scout for Wolf Kahn during Kahn’s visit to Augusta.

Travels to Ireland.


1999

California Place, 1986-87, is featured in the January issue of Art Now Gallery Guide Southeast.

Is profiled as a collector of historic artifacts, including swords, jugs and furniture, in the catalogue for the Historic Augusta Antiques Show and Sale. The article mentions that Rice at age 10 for $6 bought his first historical object, a Model 1898 Spanish Cavalry saber. As a teen, he was a member of the Augusta Bottle Club. His interest in drawing and painting and history “are meshed into one,” Rice explained. “The historical is always very much a part of why I paint or draw something.” His art collection then included work by James Rosen, Freeman Schoolcraft, Wolf Kahn, Lamar Wood, Janice Williams and Berry Fleming.

Is included in 100 Years/100 Artists: Views of the 20th Century in South Carolina Art at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, a survey of 20th-century art in the state. Prior to that was among 21 artists in a preview of the exhibition at Bank of America in Columbia.

Is included in U.S. Artists: The American Art Exposition, 33th St. Armory, Philadelphia, Pa., through Red Piano Gallery, Hilton Head, SC; Gallery Artists, Hodges Taylor Gallery; and Visionaries, a three-person exhibition at The Red Piano Gallery. He also is in Red Piano Gallery’s Southern Arts Series, which included Bather, a painting with which Rice “has pushed the envelope of what is ‘Southern art’,” Lisa Morekis wrote in the May issue of Hilton Head Monthly.


2000

Writes Introduction: A Remembrance for Freeman and Cora Schoolcraft: A Tribute, published by the Morris Museum of Art, accompanying the exhibition by that name at the museum, which Rice helps organize. “As the years unfolded,” Rice wrote, “the Schoolcrafts easily became my most important creative influence. Freeman and Cora taught me everything I know about color, and more important things as well: self-reliance, the meaning of dedication.”

Writes Artists’ Spaces for Berry Fleming: Augusta Artist and Author, published by the Morris Museum of Art.

Edward Rice: Architectural Works 1978 – 1998 is at Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art.

Edward Rice: Selected Paintings 1995 – 2000 is at Mary Pauline Gallery, Augusta, Ga. The exhibition contained architectural, figurative and landscape paintings. “If you had to find a single unifying theme in my work,” Rice told the Augusta Chronicle’s Steven Uhles for the April 28 issue, “it’s that they all deal with light.” Saying he is more interested in the style of buildings than their age, Rice said: “The architectural paintings are all about precision and geometry. It’s very, very controlled – a very drafted drawing.” Of his landscapes, he said: “I go out with a canvas and start painting and don’t stop until it’s finished. Then at the end of the day, if they are successful, I keep them.”

Edward Rice, featuring landscape, architectural and figurative paintings, is the inaugural exhibition of The Summer House Gallery in Highlands, NC.

Edward Rice: Recent Paintings is at Greenville’s Hampton III Gallery.

Is included in Personal Circumstances: Georgia Artists at the End of the Century at Spruill Center Gallery in Atlanta; the 30th Anniversary Exhibition of Hampton III Gallery; Fourteen for 2000 at Augusta’s Mary Pauline Gallery; Gallery Artists at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, NM; U.S. Artists: The American Art Exposition, 33th St. Amory, Philadelphia, through Hilton Head’s Red Piano Gallery; Personal Circumstance: Georgia Artists at the End of the Century, Spruill Center Gallery, Atlanta; and Contemporary Southern Painting: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Morris Museum of Art.

Receives a commission from the Augusta Museum of History for a large architectural painting.

Travels to England and Ireland.

2001

Is in group show at Charlotte’s Hodges Taylor Gallery.

Edward Rice: Recent Landscapes and Architectural Paintings in Oils and Acrylics is at Highlands, NC’s, The Summer House Gallery.

Is included in Holiday Exhibition at Mary Pauline Gallery; Still Life: The Object, at Hampton III Gallery; Southern Landscape Painting at the Charles B. Goddard Center for Visual Arts in Ardmore, OK; Buy Art at The Bottleworks in Athens, Ga; Director’s Choice: Continuation of Twentieth Century in Review at the Gibbes Museum of Art; and Reconstructing Eden: Looking at the Contemporary American Landscape at Hodges Taylor Gallery. Among others included in the latter exhibition were Beverly Buchanan, Mark Flowers, Phil Garrett, Maud Gatewood, Susan Page and Tom Stanley.

The Exchange Building is purchased by the Gibbes Museum of Art through Santa Fe’s Gerald Peters Gallery.

Travels to England and Ireland and is visiting artist at the Institute of Technology, Sligo, Ireland.

2002

Is discussed in Morris Museum of Art: A Decade In Review 1992 – 2002, which includes an image of 1007 Walton Way, 1982.

Edward Rice: New Paintings is at Charlotte’s Hodges Taylor Gallery, along with Mark Flowers: Recent Work.

Edward Rice: Architectural & Lowcountry Paintings is at Hilton Head’s The Red Piano Gallery.

Edward Rice opens in April at Augusta’s Mary Pauline Gallery.


Exhibits at the San Francisco International Exposition through Larry Evans Fine Art, San Francisco.

Is included in Realism In The South: After 1960 and Contemporary Mix at the Morris Museum of Art; Art In The South; Recent Acquisitions and Projects at the Ogden Museum of Art, New Orleans, La.; Vistas and Plateaus at Summit One Gallery, Highlands, NC; and Twentieth Century in Review at the Gibbes Museum of Art.

Travels to Greece and Turkey, New Mexico and Arizona.

2003

Produces monotypes with master printer Phil Garrett at Garrett’s King Snake Press in Greenville, SC.

In October rents a home in New Orleans, paints a series of small architectural paintings and begins larger canvases featuring New Orleans architecture that are completed over the next year in his North Augusta studio.

Produces a lithograph, edition 100, commissioned by New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art, printed with Jackson Cheatham, Lullwater Press.

Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes is at the Morris Museum of Art, accompanied by a catalogue by the same title. “It’s so immediate,” Rice told The State newspaper of Columbia, SC, in its December 5 issue, about producing monotypes. “There’s really no going back. You paint the plate and print the plate… With my paintings, I’ll go back over it 1,000 times. The longest any of the prints took was 10 minutes – I did several under 60 seconds.” David Houston, chief curator of New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art, wrote in the catalogue: “Edward Rice’s exploration of the monotype process…is not unlike his earlier, experimental paintings of his fig tree. Quicker, looser, and more instinctive in approach than his oil paintings, these prints offer both a brief overview and a summation of developments in his work of the last decade.”

Is included in The Story of the South: Art and Culture, 1890 – 2003 at New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Is in From the Collection at the Greenville County Museum of Art.

Is included in Expanding the Scope: From the Permanent Collection at the South Carolina State Museum.

Is part of Art in America: A Southern Perspective I at Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art.

Movie director Ron Howard purchases Bright Clouds through Hilton Head’s Red Piano Gallery.


2004

Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes is at Charlotte’s Hodges Taylor Gallery, along with Matt Overend: New Paintings.

Edward Rice: Paintings & Monotypes is at New Orleans’ Marguerite Oestreicher Fine Arts.

Edward Rice: Paintings and Monotypes is at Greenville’s Hampton III Gallery.

Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes is at Highlands Summit One Gallery.

Is included in South Carolina Birds: A Fine Arts Exhibition, Sumter Gallery of Art. The exhibition, curated by Wim Roefs, also travels to Myrtle Beach’s Burroughs & Chapin Museum later that year, and in 2006 to the City Gallery at Waterfront Park in Charleston, SC, and the Pickens Museum of Art and History in Pickens, SC.

Is included in Places and Spaces: Landscapes and Genre Scenes in the South at Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art.

Travels to Arizona and Italy, where he produces watercolors, as well as Ireland and England, where he studies Stanley Spencer’s botanical paintings at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham-on-Thames, England.


2005

“If I sum up the basic thing he gave me,” artist Luke Allsbrook said in Augusta’s Metro Spirit, February 17 – 23, of his mentor, Ed Rice, “he gave me a conviction that the study of nature is the foundation of painting.”

In May has first exhibition at Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta.

Dormer With Downspout, 2004, is featured in a half-page, color ad in the May issue of Art in America, announcing Rice’s exhibition at Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta.

Sunflower In August, 2005, is featured in a color ad for Fraser Fox Gallery, Charleston, SC, in the summer issue of Art & Antiques.

Paintings and Watercolors by Edward Rice is at Augusta’s Mary Pauline Gallery.

In October participates in New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s O What A Night benefit auction.

Is in Construction Crew, an if ART exhibition at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, Columbia, SC, that also includes Klaus Hartmann, Kim Keats and Peter Lenzo. In such paintings as Gable With Bracket I and II,” if ART owner Wim Roefs wrote in the catalogue, “Rice turns high realism into a stark minimalist geometry linked to the post-war abstract modernism of, say, Elsworth Kelly, Donald Judd and Frank Stella. That he uses traditional Southern buildings to do so gives the work a twist of Postmodern irony. And to paint paint and use painted wood to depict painted wood, as Rice does in Cornice With Brick Façade, a painting on panel, is not just clever but conceptual to boot.”

Produces watercolors; subject matter includes images from the Southwest.

Travels to Guatemala, taking note of plant forms in the rain forest.


2006

Exhibits at ArtLondson through Atlanta’s Barbara Archer Gallery.

Is included in the South Carolina Arts Commission exhibition State Art Collection 1987 – 2006 at the Sumter Gallery of Art; Painterly Prints: Works From King Snake Press 1998 – 2006 at Upstairs Gallery, Tryon, NC; Savannah And The Islands, Horne and Thistle Gallery, Savannah, Ga.; and a group show at McBride Gallery, Killarney, Ireland.

Rice’s illustrated lecture History and its Role in the Work of Edward Rice at Augusta’s Morris Museum of Art, hosted by the museum, Mary Pauline Gallery and artist Tom Nakashima, draws a standing-room-only crowd; the fire marshal turned people away.

Is on a panel with Michael Tyzack and Philip Morsberger at the South Carolina State Museum at the occasion of an exhibition there of work by Brian Rutenberg.

Is visiting artist at Augusta State University.

Travels to Rome, London and Dublin.


2007

Is commissioned by the Greenville County Museum of Art to paint four paintings of Greenville architecture.

Exhibits at Art DC, Washington, D.C., through Augusta’s Mary Pauline Gallery; one of his works, River God, is reproduced in the Washington Times.

Participates in New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s O What A Night benefit auction.

Experiments with barn motif, producing numerous canvases in different colors, using different paints.

Is in Construction Crew III, an if ART exhibition at Columbia’s Gallery 80808/Vista Studios that also includes Steven Chapp, Jeff Donovan and Janet Orselli. “Ed Rice has been painting part of a barn lately, many times, seen from the front, in the same flat, symmetrical composition,” if ART owner Wim Roefs wrote in the catalogue. “The new work takes Rice… to a modern, even contemporary approach. It’s not just the repetition. The barn images top the minimalism of his architectural-detail paintings. The paint application is juicy. He looks more at contemporary art these days, Rice says, mentioning exhibitions by Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud.”

Is included in Christmas Show 2007 at Vangard Gallery in Cork, Ireland.

Produces monotypes with master printer Phil Garrett at Garrett’s King Snake Press in Greenville, SC.

Travels to England and Ireland, producing small landscape paintings in Ireland and exhibiting in a group show at Cork’s Vangard Gallery.


2008

His Augusta gallery, Mary Pauline Gallery, closes.

Exhibits in a solo show with Mary Pauline Projects at an Augusta residence.

Is included in the monotype exhibition 10 Years At King Snake Press at the Greenville County Museum of Art.

Completes first of four commissioned paintings, Christ Church, for the Greenville County Museum of Art.

Exhibits with Philip Morsberger at Highlands’ Summit One Gallery.

Travels to Ireland, painting small landscapes and completing construction of a house and studio in Clonakilly, County Cork.

Edward Rice: Paintings 1996 – 2008 is at if ART Gallery, Columbia, SC, accompanied by a catalogue.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC
Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Ga.
Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC
Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC
McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Ga.
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, La.
Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, Fla.
South Carolina Arts Commission State Art Collection, Columbia, SC
South Carolina State Museum, Columbia, SC

SELECTED CORPORATE COLLECTIONS

Bank of America, Charlotte, NC
Carolina First, Greenville, SC
John Wieland Homes Inc., Atlanta, Ga.
Springs Industries, New York, NY
Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC
Troutman Sanders, Atlanta, Ga.