Ross Palmer Beecher

Ross Palmer Beecher grew up in Riverside, CT. Her Puerto Rican grandfather, a Yale educated attorney, married her Ziegfeld dancer grandmother. Her parents worked in advertising and communications, but loved cocktail parties and sailing.

Beecher made art and objects at an early age and later studied art at RISD, before dropping out, after which she was on her own financially. In 1970 Ross began making and learning about quilts, inspired by some images from a quilt show her sister saw at the Whitney Museum in NYC. She came to Seattle in 1978 and began to make political cartoons as hand-colored Xerox prints at Pike Place Market before she made found object art. She joined the Greg Kucera Gallery in 1986, where she has had more than ten one-person exhibitions and been exhibited in many thematic exhibitions.

In 1980, Community Psychiatric Clinic offered her a part-time job running their art program. She began making woodcut prints and metal quilts as art, connecting to her New England roots through some of her chosen imagery and her love of folk art idioms.

When the AIDS epidemic broke out, Bailey-Boushay House hired her to run its art therapy program. She’s now 63, single, and still enjoying doing patient care there through the art program. Working with patients to make art informs her own art making.

Surveys of Beecher’s work have been exhibited at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, OR; the Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA; the Seattle Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum.