Florence Miller Pierce

The first time Pierce wanted to experiment with sandblasting, she went to a shop where headstones were carved. Pierce asked to be allowed to use the machines for her art. The men told her she'd have to come back "with her man," before they'd let her use the equipment. Going outside she hired a passing stranger to come back inside with her as her requisite male accompaniment. The resultant wood and foam carvings, which she called "Totems", made by the use of the stencils, are often intricate. On the stones and foam pieces appear some of the basic geometric forms from both early paintings and later resin works (circles, triangles, crescents) but also at times textured grains and amorphous forms that suggest fossils emerging from stone or a forgotten glyphic language. Later works on Styrofoam slabs were painted over with a mixture of sand and latex. These pieces, with their sandstone-like skins, were called Earth Skins. She began to show these in the early 1970s.

The origin of the resin works, which Pierce would go on to explore, refine, and create for the rest of her artistic life, is well known. In 1969 while working on a foam piece Pierce accidentally spilled some resin onto a piece of aluminum foil. She held the foil to the light and the effect of the mirror surface reflecting light up through the resin entranced her. In the beginning, Pierce poured the resin onto mirrored glass, but the resin did not bond well with the surface. Eventually she began to use Plexiglas mirrors (Mirrorplex) which allowed the resin to stick. Art critic Julie Sasse writes of these pieces, "Whereas her earlier easel paintings relied on color and light, these new works created their own emanating glow ..."

At the time of her marriage, Miller had kept her maiden name, but after her husband's death she took on the name Pierce. For several years following her husband's death, Pierce did not paint or make art. However, by the late 1960s she began to work again, this time not with paintings but sculpture. She began carving in a variety of materials including polyurethane, Styrofoam, balsa wood cement, and stone. The new medium reinvigorated her, providing "a sense of risk and adventure that is totally necessary to my creative life."

Following the onset of health issues and economic setbacks Horace Pierce decided the family should move back to New Mexico in 1946. The period was relatively fallow for Miller. While Pierce found work as a technical illustrator, Miller frequently worked at her mother's new school in Albuquerque. Though the couple met with former members of the Transcendental Painting Group, the fact that the couple were not painting created a barrier. As Miller said, "We didn't have an answer. We had to make a living. And Raymond would cross you off his list if you weren’t painting." In the later 1950s Miller began working on sumi brush drawings on rice paper. Black on white, the sumi pieces are spontaneous and abstract, but with the suggestion of an organic origin beneath. Her work on these paintings stopped in 1958 when Horace died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

In 1942 the couple moved to Los Angeles, encouraged by artists they knew who lived and worked in L.A. in the film industry. There were also a number of their old Taos acquaintances who had relocated there. Los Angeles proved to be an artistically fruitful place for Miller. Economically secure for the first time in their marriage, Miller was able to draw and paint again for the first time since Taos. She studied Chinese paintings and began to draw with graphite. The resulting pieces usually contained a single biomorphic form within a softly shaded field. Most of the forms were flower or shell-like. Precise and delicate, a few of the paintings from this period survived and were later shown in the Southwest.

The Pierces had moved to New York City to seek funding for a film project Horace was working on. Although he was given an exhibition at the new Museum of Modern Art in 1940, the impending war made finding real backing for the film difficult. The couple ended up being forced to make scented candles to make ends meet. Miller stopped painting during this period. The couple had lost a son just before leaving for New York, and Miller gave birth to a second son, Christopher Miller Pierce, during their early months in the city.

Miller found that the winter program at The Bisttram School of Art was very different from what she had experienced in the summer. With fewer students the dynamic was much more intense and the focus was entirely on abstraction rather than on figurative painting. It was also hard work. The students were responsible for keeping the studio's woodstove alight and were required to work eight hours a day. During this period she met fellow art student Horace Pierce. The two began a friendship which eventually became a romance. They were married in 1938.

In 1938 Bisttram invited Miller and her husband Horace Pierce to join the Transcendental Painting Group, which he co-founded with artist Raymond Jonson. Miller was one of only two women (along with Agnes Pelton) to belong to the group and, at only 19, she was certainly the youngest member.

Florence Melva Pierce née Miller (July 27, 1918 – October 25, 2007) was an American artist best known for her innovative resin relief paintings. Her work has often been linked with monochrome painting and minimalism.

Florence Melva Miller was born on July 27, 1918. She grew up in Washington, D.C. where her parents owned and managed a large boarding school named the Countryside School. As a child traveling to New Mexico to visit her mother's family in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Miller became familiar with the landscape which would later become her home. At fifteen Miller began to study art with a private tutor, May Ashton. It was Ashton who introduced Miller to the Phillips Collection, considered to be the first museum of Modern Art in the United States. It was a rare opportunity for the young girl to develop an appreciation of some of modern art's greatest masters. Miller spent considerable time at the museum and began to take classes at the Studio School there in 1935.