Partner Jane Wasey
Queer Places:
Wellesley College (Seven Sisters), 106 Central St, Wellesley, MA 02481
The Art Students League of New York, 215 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019
2447 Atlantic Hwy, Northport, ME 04849
Priscilla Pattison (December 11, 1919 - February 10, 2013) was an American artist. Her sculpture has been exhibited in galleries, museums and universities throughout the United States and Canada and is in numerous public and private collections.
Priscilla Pattison was born in Chicago, Illinois, December 11, 1919, the fourth of William L. and Bonnie A. Pattison's seven children. Priscilla's sister was Harriet Pattison, who, when a theater student at Yale, met the architect Louis Kahn. This chance encounter served as preamble to a fifteen-year romance, with Pattison becoming the architect’s closest confidante, his intellectual partner, and the mother of his only son. Priscilla attended Francis Parker School and graduated from Wellesley College in the class of 1941. She served in the US Army from 1942 to 1945 achieving the rank of Captain. After the war, under the GI Bill, Pattison studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Arts Students League in New York with William Zorach before spending a year in the Paris studio of sculptor, Osipp Zadkine.
Pattison settled in Greenwich Village in 1951, and was an instructor of art at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in Purchase, New York, from 1953 to 1956 and had her first solo show at the Juster Gallery in New York City in 1960. Many solo and group shows followed. After leaving New York, she lived and worked on Martha’s Vineyard, Ma. for 16 years. Some of her sculptures can be seen in St. Andrew’s Church, in Edgartown, and on the Tisbury Town Hall Pediment in Vineyard Haven.
In 1974 Pattison moved to Lincolnville, Maine, where she had summered as a child, with her long-time friend and fellow sculptor, Jane Wasey. Wasey and Pattison worked in their studio on Penobscot Bay. Wasey carved in stone, and Pattison worked primarily in welded metals and cast bronze. They exhibited their work widely across Maine, New England, New York and Nova Scotia, Canada. In Pattison’s later years she painted prolifically in oils.
Pattison played the flute throughout her life, and was a lover of music of many genres. She played in school and college orchestras, chamber groups in Camden, Maine as well as with the Lincolnville band.
Priscilla Pattison was a sailor, lover of dogs and the natural world. She could be seen daily walking down through the field to the Penobscot Bay with her Standard Poodle in any weather, any season. She was devoted to her family and friends, and her door was always open wide in welcome. Courageous, independent and generous, Priscilla was true to herself, and the pursuit of her art.
She died after a long illness on February 10th in Camden, Maine.
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