Pazo Fine Art is pleased to congratulate Terry Parmelee on the acquisition of Rose by The Phillips Collection.
Theodora (Terry) Lillian Schreiber Parmelee was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1929. She graduated in 1967 with an MA in Fine Arts from American University in Washington, DC. In the late 1950s, she studied with Un'Ichi Hiratsuka in Tokyo, Japan. Upon her return to the United States, she began to experiment with abstraction by just painting lines. In 1966, Parmelee engaged in a crucial stretch of private study with the great American woodblock printer, Carol Summers. Working through this key influence, Parmelee produced 122 original works, which were eventually published in 2003 as Terry Parmelee Prints 1966-1999: A Catalogue Raisonne.
While Parmelee regularly exhibited her prints, galleries which represented the graphic work were reluctant to exhibit her painting. In the decidedly masculine world of the Washington Color School, it seemed printmaking was a natural reserve for women artists. In 2022, we now find ourselves confronting painted works which in fairness should have been seen forty or fifty years ago. The work acquired by the Phillips Collection, Rose, was painted in the late 1960s. Its saturated color of mineral clarity is laid in a mother's matrix of overlapping circles, which creates a luminous, hard-edged mandala. This is the first painting of Parmelee's to enter a museum in Washington D.C.
In addition, Parmelee’s original woodcuts are included in the collections of The University of Delaware, IBM, the First National Bank of Chicago, Georgetown University, The Smithsonian American Art, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.