Barbara Gillette Price, prolific painter, fine arts teacher, and former president of Moore College of Art & Design, has died at 87
At Moore, she increased enrollment, established a career center, and personally refurbished her three-story studio on North Second Street into a student gallery.
Barbara Gillette Price, 87, formerly of Philadelphia, celebrated painter and designer, former president of Moore College of Art & Design, former dean of Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, former vice president for academic affairs at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, fine arts teacher, mentor, and role model, died Friday, April 24, of age-associated decline at a hospital in Granada, Spain.
A lifelong artist and longtime educator, Ms. Gillette Price liked to skip her high school classes in the 1950s and wander around the galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In sixth grade, she told The Inquirer in 1994, her artistic talent drew attention from the teacher when her drawing of a female form was all too accurate.
She took Saturday classes at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and the Fleisher Art Memorial when she was young, and earned a scholarship to the old Philadelphia Museum School of Art. She married artist Melville Price in 1957, moved to Tuscaloosa, Ala., in 1958, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts at the University of Alabama.
She joined Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1978, the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1982, and Moore in 1994. At each stop, she renovated nearby old buildings into studios and galleries, expanded curriculum, and invigorated students with international and innovative programs.
At Moore, she increased enrollment, established a career center, and personally refurbished her three-story studio on North Second Street into a gallery where students exhibited their work and handled logistics and publicity. She also forged working relationships with the School District of Philadelphia and other art institutions, supervised an advertising campaign for women artists, and served as a role model for working artists in academia.
“That’s why I think my presence at Moore is a good thing,” she told The Inquirer in 1994.
In 1998, Rochelle Levy, then chair of Moore’s board of trustees, said: “Barbara has really been our ambassador out there. She has set an incredible role model for the students as a woman artist.”
Ms. Gillette Price left Moore in 1998, moved to Spain in 2000, taught art to primary school students, and continued to create and show her work. “Her commitment to arts education helped shape generations of creative thinkers,” former colleagues at Moore said in a tribute. “Her legacy lives on through the institutions she helped strengthen, the students she inspired, and the vibrant body of artistic work she leaves behind.”
As an artist, Ms. Gillette Price was a colorist and inspired by what she called her “labyrinth of imagination.” She expressed herself often in themes and collages, and was adept at abstract and figurative works on canvas, paper, wood, silk, and other textiles.
One critic said her work “is of an inherent elegance that emerges from excellent craftsmanship and an intelligent narrative.”
She showed in dozens of solo and group exhibitions in Spain, Philadelphia, Maryland, Michigan, Washington, and elsewhere, and liked to work in the gallery as well as her studio. She painted about nature, light, woman’s perspectives, isolation and fear during the COVID-19 pandemic, and other topics.
“I seek to make the ordinary extraordinary,” she said on her website, barbaragilletteprice.com. “I am inspired by images I accumulate as I travel and view the world about me. This takes the form of remembered landscapes, figurative compositions, and subtle political statements.”
She was active in the Civil Rights movement in Alabama in the 1960s, worked with the Woman’s Caucus for Art in Washington in the 1970s, and taught ceramics, painting, and drawing at the old Corcoran School of Art & Design in Washington and elsewhere. She belonged to the College Art Association and was on boards at the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, the Philadelphia Art Commission, and other organizations.
She earned grants for her painting and wrote essays and white papers about art. In one paper, she said: “The arts are the humanizing element in the education of the citizens of the 21st century.”
Barbara Amelia Gillette was born June 26, 1938, in Philadelphia. She and her family spent many summers in Atlantic City, and she graduated from Philadelphia High School for Girls.
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She took piano lessons, attended Saturday concerts at the Philadelphia Orchestra for years, and hung out with high school boyfriend Edward Cutler and others at jazz clubs and the Gilded Cage coffee shop.
Melville Price died in 1970, and she reconnected with Edward Cutler. They married, had a daughter, Michelle, and lived in Washington. They divorced later, and he died earlier.
“I consider my mother’s greatest achievement to be the way she showed up as a parent,” her daughter said. “Her artistic legacy can be found in her paintings, drawings, textiles, and exhibitions. Her personal legacy lives on in the people she inspired, mentored, encouraged, and welcomed into her life.”
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Gillette Price is survived by a son-in-law, Eric Maroldo, and other relatives. A sister died earlier.
Services were held earlier.
Donations in her name may be made to Alhama Street Animal Protection in Granada, Spain.
