Louis native, was already well known, having studied architecture at Washington University.

(5)Ĭonsidering herself a painter in New York, Ray next headed to the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit, a graduate school of design, art, and architecture. While absorbing the city’s cultural milieu, Ray developed passions for art films, modern dance (studying with Martha Graham and Hanya Holm) and the geometric work of Piet Mondrian. She protested alongside Lee Krasner, Laszolo Moholy-Nagi and Fernand Leger. After two years, she moved to New York City to attend the Art Students League and then followed legendary art teacher Hans Hofmann to his own art school in Manhattan. Hofmann also taught in Provincetown on Cape Cod in summers, stressing his modernist theories of color and form in nature through a push/pull spatial method adopted by many Abstract Expressionists. While studying with Hofmann for six years, Ray became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group that picketed conservative galleries and promoted radical avant-garde work in NYC. Ray entered the May Friend Bennett School in Millbrook, NY, a well-known finishing school. She graduated from Sacramento High School and then, with her widowed mother, moved to New York State to be near her brother at West Point. Ray was Bernice Alexandra Kaiser, born in Sacramento, CA, in 1911, nurtured by her parents, especially her father who managed the vaudeville Grand Theater there.

Charles & Ray Eames by Gloria Koenig