UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
Las Vegas, Nevada
We believe everyone deserves access to art that challenges our understanding of the present and inspires us to create a future that makes space for us all.
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Artist: Rita Deanin Abbey (1930-2021)
Abbey was raised in Passaic, New Jersey She graduated from the University of New Mexico with an MFA in 1954. In 1965 she joined the art department at the University of Southern Nevada (now UNLV) and taught there until 1987. In his book Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada (1999), the writer William L. Fox stresses her “prodigious” artistic output “in watercolor, ink, oil, acrylic, oil pastel, steel, bronze, copper, vitreous enamels, Plexiglass, fiberglass, polyurethane foam, polyester resin, mahogany,” and her debt to the basin and range landscape where she spent most of her life. “[W]here they [the works] take us is into contemplation of natural form, akin to what we feel when confronted in person by the geology of the desert.”
"A Towering Spirit" Piece by Scott Dickensheets about Rita Deanin Abbey in Double Scoop