Soli Pierce’s first one-woman painting show in NYC was at Beaux Arts in 1983. A New York State Council of the Arts Grant in 1984 allowed her the freedom to pursue cutting edge work in video, technology, photography and assemblage. The grant led to an Off-Broadway theatre piece, a multi-screen installment called SUBWAYOUT, and spoke to the alienation and fast pace of modern life.

Lizanne Merrill and Soli Pierce formed an artistic duo called Merrill & Pierce and their digitized video images in the mid- to late-eighties received recognition from the New York Times and The Village Voice and traveled internationally, with stipend to exhibits in Kohn, Berlin, and Munich, Germany. In response to this work, Pierce was offered, and accepted, an adjunct professorship in photography at New York University in 1989.

When the economics of her life demanded a different kind of creativity, she founded Sherwood Forest Design in 1991, a successful three-decade decorative arts line of heirloom bowls and tableware. Her art bowls are on tables around the world, and they’ve had numerous partnerships with international fine art institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

All through that time, she continued to explore with encaustics, and transformed found natural objects. Her recent Portal and Ghost Forest encaustic series have been exhibited in Venice and London.

In 2021, nature guided her once again. The isolation of Covid-19 nurtured her deeply and offered her time to plant new creative seeds. A new series in collaboration with Bruce Odland entitled The Sound Forest—a fusion of her past and present via portals made with wood, encaustics, beeswax, moss, and sound—calls upon all the senses and simultaneously sounds the alarm, expressing a last, desperate hope, and a call for action.

solipierce.com