Elizabeth price artist biography
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In other exhibitions she showed alongside Rae Sloan Bredin, Daniel Garber, Henry Snell and John Folinsbee.
She made numerous trips abroad garnering subject material from the landscapes, streets and people in Italy and France. Best known for her flower compositions, her work also includes figures, landscapes, marine and genre.
Price came from a family that was well connected in the art world of New York and Bucks County.
The narrators consider how these buildings manifest the experience of the Catholic diaspora at this time, many of whom worked on the reconstruction of British cities, bombed during the war of 1939-45.
A large number of the churches featured echo the municipal style of civic buildings, schools and swimming pools built in the intensive period of reconstruction that followed World War II.
The resemblance of these churches to social, secular buildings reveals a church engaged in the social lives of its congregations, and possibly less aloof from the realities of work, migration and war.
In ‘HERE WE ARE’, Price suggests that in these buildings, we see a diasporic minority announce – sometimes cautiously, often boldly – both their sense of difference and belonging within British towns and cities.
Before transitioning to video art, Price initially trained as a painter, earning her MFA at the Royal College of Art in London. Her 2015 piece K investigates the decommissioning of a government office and the archived histories it contains, presenting a speculative future where digital culture collides with human memory. She joined the Philadelphia Ten in 1921 and exhibited with them as well for many years.
The Guardian art critic declared the "focus and drive of Price's work, the cutting and the atmosphere, mark her out".
Price says her videos take a year to make. One of her brothers in Manhattan, Frederic Newlin Price, ran Feragil Galleries, which represented Price as well as such New Hope artists as Daniel Garber and Henry Snell.
Mary Elizabeth Price never married and died in 1965.
In 1986 Price was a founder of the Oxford-based indie pop band, Talulah Gosh, in which she was one of the singers.
It is the first chapter of a two-part series of videos supported by Kingston University, London and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
The artist and Liverpool Biennial would also particularly like to thank the Priests, administrators and parishioners of the many churches who participated in the project.
I’m interested in the medium of video as something you experience sensually as well as something you might recognise."
X, British Film Institute, London
Elizabeth Price
Presented for the first time at Liverpool Biennial 2025, this major new single channel film by Turner-Prize winning artist Elizabeth Price, centres on the architectural history of Catholic modernist churches in post-war Britain, a foundational architecture designed to house incoming communities, reflecting Liverpool’s own migratory patterns.
The piece delves into the relationship between space, tragedy, and collective memory, highlighting Price’s ability to use visual and auditory elements to evoke emotional and intellectual engagement. These range from modest structures and conversions to bold, highly experimental modernist buildings. The video also features over 20 other churches from areas across North West England including Birkenhead, Blackpool, Bolton, Huyton, Preston and Wigan.
Courtesy of the artist.
Price’s intellectually rigorous, visually compelling installations continue to explore how historical and cultural narratives are constructed, manipulated, and preserved in the digital age.
Elizabeth Price (artist)
Price was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The details of all of the churches photographed are included in the video credits.
Mary Elizabeth Price
Mary Elizabeth Price was born in 1877 in West Virginia, and at an early age she moved with her Quaker family back to the familial farm in Solebury (Bucks County) Pennsylvania.
The work features historic photographs from the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) archive as well as a series of newly commissioned architectural photographs (taken by Andrew Lee) with a particular emphasis upon churches in the North West.
In ‘HERE WE ARE’, Price explores how these distinctive, modern buildings can tell a story of 20th century migration and post-war uncertainty.
She examines how objects and histories are categorized, archived, and interpreted. Her background in painting is evident in her meticulous approach to composition and imagery in her videos, where she layers archival footage, digital graphics, text, and music to craft immersive, narrative-driven works.Price’s videos often explore institutional archives, societal histories, and forgotten narratives, weaving these elements into thought-provoking stories.
This is a story that speaks both to Liverpool’s foundation as a city formed by migration and the welcome that is owed to incoming communities today, which now includes Catholic congregations from Poland, Ukraine, Nigeria and Ghana. She first exhibited with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1914 and every year between 1926 and 1943.
She explained "I use digital video to try and explore the divergent forces that are at play when you bring so many different technological histories together... They were built by and for the expanding Catholic diaspora in Britain, which came primarily from Ireland but also from Southern and Eastern Europe.
During the course of the video – which is narrated by a collage of multiple voices, derived from varied archival and contemporary sources – we are shown a wide range of modern church designs.
The story opens with the 1937 futurist church of Our Lady Star of the Sea and St Winefride in Amlwch, Anglesey, designed by the Italian-born engineer Giuseppe Rinvolucri, and concludes with some of the remarkable churches created by Liverpool’s F.X. Velarde in the post-war period. There she received her education at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Arts and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
During her long and active career, Price achieved notable exhibition history including exhibitions at the Corcoran Biennial, National Academy of Design, and in 1927 she won the Carnegie Prize for the best oil painting by an American Artist in the exhibition.