Pie Project exhibit showcases Florence Miller Pierce, one of the most underrated artists of the 20th century

SANTA FE — Florence Miller Pierce’s “Translucence,” which runs through Saturday, April 26, at Pie Projects, is a must-see exhibition by one of the most underrated artists of the 20th century.

Pierce’s shaped resin wall pieces, which she began making in 1968, might not seem too out of place with works of their era. They share obvious affinities with the shaped canvases of Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, and with the optical experiments of Helen Pashgian, Larry Bell and other Light and Space artists. But those artists, by and large, aimed for slick industrial-grade perfection, whereas Pierce’s art looked conspicuously old from the outset, like yellowed Art Deco relics.

Unlike those younger artists, Pierce, who was born in 1918, actually lived through the Art Deco era. No doubt she borrowed her motif of fans opening and closing from the Japanese fan motif so ubiquitous in Art Deco and Hollywood Regency style design.

Pierce developed many innovative techniques for making fiberglass resin on mirrored Plexiglas and aluminum look like all sorts of luxe materials, from marble to shagreen to mother-of-pearl — techniques that involved pressing and peeling away layers of parchment and vellum while the resin was still sticky. As a result, the finished works are often described as “milky” and “pearlescent” — adjectives not often associated with minimalism but appropriate for a lot of Art Deco art, from Florine Stettheimer’s creamy “Cathedral” paintings to René Lalique’s decorative frosted glass objects.

That is to say, Pierce’s resin paintings feel slightly out of place in time, disrupting linear art historical chronologies. Perhaps they even represent conscious reflections on the aesthetic zeitgeist of her younger years, seen through middle-aged eyes and filtered through her newfound materials and processes.

Pierce continued her resin experiments for decades. The works in “Translucence” at Pie Projects are from the 1980s and ’90s, but they don’t look it. They either look much older, or much newer, than that.

It’s not unusual for young artists now, in the second decade of the 21st century, to make new art that looks old. Wen Liu’s baroque wall reliefs are a good example of this tendency. But when Pierce was working, art audiences still generally expected new art to look, well, new. That’s why these pieces, which may have looked old-fashioned to some of her contemporaries, look ahead of their time to me.

Decades before Pierce began working with resin, she was an active member of the Transcendental Painting Group, which lasted from 1938 to 1941. This short-lived New Mexican art movement, whose mystical aesthetics mirrored those of Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, was long overlooked by the New York art establishment until the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a major retrospective of fellow TPG member Agnes Pelton in 2020. A similar retrospective for Pierce is overdue.

Of course, there’s no denying that Pierce is having a moment in New Mexico right now. Along with her Pie Projects solo, her work is featured in Vladem Contemporary’s “Shadow and Light,” which runs through April 28, as well as the Albuquerque Museum’s new show, “Light, Space, and the Shape of Time.”

These exhibitions offer excellent opportunities for local audiences to experience her work in the flesh, and I hope awareness of her significance will spread beyond New Mexico in the coming years. Pierce too often gets pigeonholed as a regional artist, and, while her work is included in 14 museum collections, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, she’s not yet in any of the major museums in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, London or Paris.

Predictably, then, her work is undervalued vis-à-vis her peers. I don’t usually like to talk about money and art, but when you consider that Agnes Martin’s artworks have regularly exceeded $10 million at auction, and one of Agnes Pelton’s paintings fetched over $3 million, Pierce’s prices — $7,500 to $40,000 — seem shockingly low, even for retail. Then again, there’s no telling when, if ever, the international art market will get hip to Pierce’s art. I have no crystal ball.

In her lifetime, Pierce never seemed particularly concerned with making gobs of money or becoming an art star. By all accounts, she approached art making as a personal spiritual practice. But she occupies a unique place in art history, bridging early 20th century mystical abstraction, Art Deco, minimalism and Light and Space art, while paving the way for 21st century explorations of materiality and memory.

Pie Project exhibit showcases Florence Miller Pierce, one of the most underrated artists of the 20th century