Rose Piper (1917-2005) Rose Piper was born in New York in 1917, and spent nearly the entirety of her long and varied career there, beginning with her education at Hunter College (she was awarded a four year scholarship at Pratt Institute but her father believed Pratt was not really a college), and then at the Art Student’s League, studying under Vaclav Vytacil and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Piper was the recipient of two prestigious Rosenwald Fellowships (1946 and 1948) which allowed her to travel to Paris for further study, and the southern United States. Her first solo exhibition at the Roko Gallery (New York) featured the results of this travel, 14 paintings based on Negro folk songs and blues songs that she had researched. The success of this show led her to be included in the 7th Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Negro Art sponsored by Atlantic University in 1948. Her painting, Grievin’ Hearted took first place and a cash prize of $300. She also exhibited at the ACA Gallery, and ran in the circle of artists which included Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and a young Jacob Lawrence. Piper experienced tremendous internal pressure due to the conflict between maintaining a “proper” home and raising her child and her creative drive and longing to work as an artist. “Piper’s awareness that she had internalized the pressure to stay home, together with her refusal to give in to that pressure, was mirrored in her work by her refusal to maintain the “proper” degree of feminine middle-class distance from erotic subject matter. The expressive realism of the images in her first solo show…were based not only on veiled resistance to white economic domination chronicled in the lyrics of Negro work songs, but also on the taboo topic of female eroticism, which was made explicit in the tradition of women blues singers like Bessie Smith’s, “I’m Wild About That Thing” and “Empty Bed Blues”.” “Some of her paintings, such as Slow Down Freight Train , 1947—after Trixie Smith’s song “Freight Train Blues”—show Alston’s influences in the elongated necks, the horizontal ovoids of the head, and in the rounded geometry of the stylized body.” A critic for Art Digest wrote, “As paintings, the pictures are strong, affirmative, sound in composition and moodily emotional in color…The recent pictures are strong, flat, semi-abstract compositions, simple in design and somewhat mournful in their color harmonies.” (Abstract Expressionism Other Politics, Ann Eden Gibson, 1997). Piper was forced to cut short her career as a painter to focus on providing a stable income for her family. She became a successful textile designer and owned a greeting card company until her retirement in 1980 when she returned to painting. Throughout her career, her work has ranged stylistically from abstract expressionist to representational.
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