Miriam C. Rice
Miriam C. Rice was born in 1918 in Clinton, Massachusetts to a large and loving Jewish family. Early on she discovered her deep interest in the arts, in particular sculpture for which she received critical recognition. By age 18 she was living in New York City and studying at the Art Students League where she met her husband, Ray Rice, to whom she was married for 59 years. As a young woman she was honored to receive an artist-in-residency at the famed artists’ community, Yaddo, in upstate New York.
During WWII she lived for several years in New Orleans, where she served as a WPA-funded assistant to sculptor Enrique Alfarez and exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art. After marriage in 1942 she followed Ray’s army company throughout the United States and finally settled once more in New York where she gave birth to the first of three daughters, Mira. Following Ray’s return from overseas, the family moved to Vermont and then to Arizona where Ray and Miriam taught art at groundbreaking alternative high schools. Art education was to be a lifelong activity for Miriam, most notably as a children’s art instructor for 40 years.
The Mexican Art Movement influenced the Rices’ work, and their circle of friends included apprentices of Diego Rivera and friends of Frida Kahlo. Miriam and the growing family, now including daughter Rachel, traveled to Mexico in 1949 where Ray planned to apprentice with famed Mexican muralist Siqueiros. The children’s sudden illness curtailed their stay and they moved on to California, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area, where daughter Felicia was born.
Miriam was an ardent feminist, it was very important to her that women could be both mothers and artists. She maintained her art practice throughout her life, thoroughly exploring sculpture, then batik and the textile arts, and finally the world of fungi through the lens of the fine arts. Several generations of women artists were supported in their personal journeys by her true interest and encouragement.
In 1960 Miriam and Ray started teaching at the newly created Mendocino Art Center, which began her 50-year sojourn on the Mendocino Coast. By the mid-70s Miriam was researching the extraction of the full spectrum of color from the wide variety of mushrooms on the north coast. She became an authority on mushroom dyes and traveled internationally to lecture and teach. Miriam published three books based on her revolutionary research, most recently “Mushrooms for Dyes, Paper, Pigments & Myco-Stix.” In 2008 the 13th International Fungi & Fibre Symposium met in Mendocino to enthusiastically honor Miriam on her 90th birthday.
Miriam’s door was always open to her ever-widening circle of friends of all ages. Artists and seekers, poets and writers, environmentalists and leftists found stimulating conversation and a smorgasbord of experimental culinary treats at her table. She was an intelligent, inquiring earth sprite and creative alchemist with a pot bubbling on the back of the stove at all times.
Miriam C. and Raymond Rice Papers
Book: Mushrooms for Dyes, Paper, Pigments & Myco-Stix™
Videos: “Mushrooms for Color” and “Mushrooms for Paper”