Slobe, Laura, 1909-1958

Laura Gray was born Laura Slobe, in Pittsburgh in 1909, to a prosperous Jewish family, but she grew up in Chicago. At age 16, she enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. By 19, she began exhibiting paintings, winning a number of prizes, and her paintings continued to appear in exhibits at the Institute and in several galleries. By the late 1930s, she began to produce and exhibit avant-garde sculpture as well, and eventually became known more for her sculpture than her painting. Her work continued to be shown in exhibits in the Chicago area until 1944.

From spring 1939 through September 1940, Gray worked for the Illinois division of the federal Works Progress Administration’s Painting and Sculptures Section, creating works of art for the program, as well as serving as an art instructor for it in Illinois and in several other states, traveling as far afield as Oregon. Gray became friendly with a group of other Chicago avante-garde artists attracted by Troskyism. One of the group was George Perle (born George Perlstein, 1915-2009), a composer, whom she married in 1940. (In the 1960s Perle became a major theorist of serialism--a method of composition associated with Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique-and was awarded a Pulitizer Prize and a MacArthur fellowship in 1986.)

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