Portrait of Ray

This photographic portrait captures Ray during an exciting moment in her career, while she was living in Manhattan and studying art. Over six-odd years, she learned the principles of abstract painting from Hans Hofmann, one of the most influential teachers of the 20th century, worked alongside artists that would come to define postwar American art, including Lee Krasner, and founded the group American Abstract Artists with her peers and older artists in order to bring attention to and foster an understanding of nonfigurative art. This organization still exists today. Artistic and intellectual life flourished in New York in the 1930s while Europe prepared to go to war and many preeminent artists and thinkers sheltered in the United States. As a result, Ray came into direct contact with radical new ideas about the role of art and objects in society. She would bring her knowledge from these encounters to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she met Charles, and the couple would combine their unique training and talents toward the development of an innovative approach to design, one that aimed to reshape American life by improving the quality of its public and domestic environments.