Lily Prince has her B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design, her M.F.A. from Bard College and attended the Skowhegan residency. Prince has exhibited widely nationally and internationally and was awarded commissions including the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and numerous hotels. Prince was awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in painting in 2020.
Lily was Artist-in-Residence at historic site Olana and was awarded residencies at Draftsmen's Congress at The New Museum, NY; BAU Institute, Italy; and Galerie Huit, Arles, France. Recently, Prince has been drawing en plein air in France, Italy, Ireland and the American west. She was recently interviewed for ArtSpiel magazine; Vasari 21; Zephyr Maize; and The Art Life on Radio Kingston.
Artist Statement:
"I take to heart the adage that beauty is the greatest form of protest. Working initially en plein air, I attempt to take what I experience observationally in nature and translate it into a language of personal expression and universal significance. I consider myself an explorer of specific terrains, studying the atmosphere of diverse spaces. In these times of environmental and societal devastation, I consider it a political act to immerse myself in the landscape to record the natural beauty lurking there: perhaps to incite the arousal of sentiment, a stirring of connectedness.
My work combines perception in the moment, memory of past space and aspiration of future place. The American west, Italy and New York's Hudson Valley are among the places I explore. My drawings function as research for studio works that are either watercolor and gouache, acrylic, marker or oil pastel. My travel research of plein air drawing combines with invented imagery back in my studio. The combined elements from all the landscapes I explore allows me to create new worlds and vistas that feel familiar, fresh and surprising. New York’s Hudson Valley contributes distant mountains and rows of corn fields; the landscape of Italy’s Crete Senesi and Lago di Como’s mountains has given my work the twisting, intertwining, ordered, pattern-infused hills; the American west’s flora and endless, open space has given my work an intensity of light and color as well as a sense of temperature and limitless, expansive possibility. My observational gesture meets abstract, patterned mark-making, creating an ordered chaos of the natural world."
Prince's work has appeared in the New York Times, NewYork magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and New American Paintings, as well as in 2 books by Richard Klin, among many other publications. She has lectured at Yale, Vassar, Cornell, RISD, SVA, and Pratt. Prince was an associate professor of painting and drawing for many years at a state university in NJ and now gives workshops and also teaches online. When she isn't traveling to plein air draw, Lily Prince is painting in her 1850's barn studio in New York's Hudson Valley or in her new Nashville studio.
Lily has been awarded commissions by numerous hotels and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. In addition to her recent residency at Galerie Huit in Arles, France, Prince was Artist-in-Residence at state historic site Olana in 2016. In 2014 Prince was chosen for Draftsmen's Congress, a residency with international artists at New York's The New Museum. Lily was one of only two international artists awarded a fully-funded residency at the BAU Institute's residency in Italy, 2013.
Lily Prince's work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, the Newark Star- Ledger, New American Paintings, San Francisco Weekly, The Bloomsbury Review, Rain Taxi, Jewish Currents Magazine, Chronogram magazine, and the literary journal Crossborder. A catalogue of her drawings The Ten Plagues was published, with poems by David Shapiro, by The Paterson Museum. In 2021 Zephyr and Maize published her work: American Beauty with Lily Prince and Richard Klin, edited by Varia Serova and also Studio Visit with Lily Prince by Varia Serova. Lily was interviewed for ArtSpiel,in 2020 byEtty Yaniv and also by Ann Landi in Vasari21. Prince has lectured widely, including at Yale, Vassar, Cornell, RISD's European Honors Program, Pratt and at the Artists Talk on Art series. Lily was interviewed on WVKR radio for their cultural currents show as well as on WBAI and WAMC, among others. Her book of portraits with writer Richard Klin's profiles, Something To Say: Thoughts on Art and Politics in America, was published by Leapfrog Press, 2011. Prince was commissioned to create 100 illustrations for Klin's book Abstract Expressionism For Beginners, published by For Beginners Books, 2016. Lily Prince lives in NY and after 30 years as an associate professor she now teaches online and offers in-person workshops.
Critic, poet and art historian David Shapiro has written about Prince's work in his essay for the catalogue Paper Point Blank:
“She seems to have a learned scattering, the carefulness that counts, and the multiple humors of the body. It is easy to discern a Tantric centering that might also be part of the heritage of her essential syncretism. These richly colored works speak of a bold mysticity. But the balance and Eros of the work is strange and strongly painterly, and strong too its reliance on a devastating doubleness of vision. In Prince, one is observing both the pleasures of observation and a severe and principled devotion to abstraction.”