Interview of Marianna Pineda, conducted by Robert Brown for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, in Brookline, Massachusetts, on June 14 and May 26, 1977.
Pineda speaks of her childhood in Chicago; travels to Europe with her mother; early encounters with sculpture and architecture at the Chicago World's Fair; studying at the Otis Art Institute, Cranbrook, and Columbia University; meeting and marrying her husband Harold Tovish; living and working in Paris, Minneapolis, and Italy; how having children affected her work; teaching at Newton College and Boston University; showing at the Swetzoff Gallery in Boston; sculpting in wood, plaster, wax, and bronze; work with the Boston Visual Artists' Union; and various of her works, including the Oracle series, the Bed series, An Effigy for the Young Lovers, Sleepwalker, and The Dance of Sleep or Death. Pineda also recalls Carl Milles, Ossip Zadkine, William Zorach, David Smith, Simon Moselsio, Oronzio Maldarelli, and others.
Biographical / Historical:
Marianna Pineda (1925-1996) was a sculptor and educator from Boston, Massachusetts. Pineda studied at Cranbrook Academy with Carl Milles, Bennington College with Simon Moselsio, University of California, Berkley, with Raymond Puccinelli, Columbia University with Oronzio Maldarelli, and in Paris with Ossip Zadkine. She met her future husband while studying at Columbia, fellow sculptor Harold Tovish. Pineda exhibited her work in group exhibitions held at Brooklyn Museum, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Carnegie Institute, Pennsylvania, and had solo shows at the Honolulu Academy of Art, Hawaii, Walker Art Center, Minnesota, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and Swetzoff Gallery, Boston. Her public commissions include a 6-foot bronze sculpture, The Spirit of Lili'oukalani, located in Honolulu, Hawaii. Pineda's sculptures are found in the permanent collections of the Boston Public Library, Walker Art Center, Fogg Art Museum, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, and others. Pineda was an instructor at Newton College of the Sacred Heart and Boston College, and was an adjunct professor of sculpture at Boston University.
General:
Originally recorded on 1 tape reel. Reformatted in 2010 as 2 digital wav files. Duration is 2 hr., 7 min.
Provenance:
These interviews are part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and others.
Topic:
Sculptors -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- Interviews Search this
