2000 South 39th Street
Saint Louis, Missouri 63110
314-773-3935
Open by appointment
bill perry: twenty-one thank yous
November 19 - December 19, 2021
Bill Perry, Andrea, acrylic painting 9 x 12 inches, 2021
Bill Perry, Brian, acrylic painting 9 x 12 inches, 2021
Bill Perry, Nate, acrylic painting 9 x 12 inches, 2021
Bill Perry, Officer Levinson, acrylic painting 9 x 12 inches, 2021
Bill Perry, Zylvia, acrylic painting 9 x 12 inches, 2021
Artist's Statement
TWENTY-ONE THANK YOUS is a collection of 21 acrylic portraits, painted over the last several months, of people who helped my family and my community during the Covid-19 pandemic: a snapshot of the network of people whose efforts allowed me and my family to live a safe, if not normal, life during the pandemic.
An immense number of people deserve our gratitude, so I have limited myself to portraits of people who helped us in a direct, immediate way. Each person’s picture is accompanied by a brief description of that person, and how he or she supported our family and community during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Over the last several years my paintings were created to shine light upon people who are often excluded from the systems and rights that most of us take for granted: portraits of orphaned children in developing nations and immigrant women in the United States. This project is in a similar vein: it is intended to recognize people who benefit our lives deeply, but often without thanks or recognition.
About Bill Perry
Bill Perry was born in Helena, Montana and later moved to Hawaii. He attended University of Hawaii receiving a BFA. In 2010 Bill received an MA from Fontbonne University in St. Louis, and an MFA also from Fontbonne in 2012. Bill taught at the Central Visual & Performing Arts High School for many years, retiring at the end of the 2021 academic year. The last two years, he devoted time to creating portraits of refugees, and now twenty-one people who have helped his family through the pandemic.
This show is about those twenty-one people and the portraits created by Bill. His portraits will be gifted to those individuals. Bill's unfailing kindness to everyone shines through in this wonderful gesture to those that endured public contact throughout the pandemic. His years of teaching, and great success with students, many becoming professional artists, speaks to Bill's innate ability to teach others by being a great mentor, both through his career giving back to our community as an instructor and his honoring people that often don't receive the recognition they deserve.
Past projects include
- “Performers of Circus Flora”: 14 oil pastel drawings: Arts & Education Council, St. Louis, MO, 2011
- "Dive Into the Dream”: 47 ink drawings: Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Gallery, Sheldon Art Galleries, March- May, 2014
- “The Big Giant Heads”, a set of four monumental stoneware tile playground sculptures, The College School of Webster Groves, 2010-2012.
- 1995 to present: twenty-five self-published calendars, illustrated in pen and ink, issues of a hundred or more.
- “Road Trip, A Fold-out Adventure", a book a child can drive a toy car through: illustrations in watercolor and pen & ink, 2014.
- Beauty, Strength, and Courage, Portraits of Immigrant Women Living in St. Louis”: the Intersect Arts Center Gallery and the International Institute, 2021 moleculefarm6.wixsite.com/immigrant-women
- Over the last two decades I have also participated in the Memory Project, (memoryproject.org), an initiative to support the well-being and self-worth of orphaned children in underdeveloped countries throughout the world by sending them original portraits of themselves. I have created nearly a hundred portraits of orphaned children for this project.