Professor Andrade was a fixture at the University for more than 30 years. Professor Andrade was highly esteemed throughout the art community, not only for the exemplary quality of her art — she was a leading practitioner of optical art — but also for her generosity to other artists, particularly as a teacher.
As a painter, she worked through several stylistic phases after graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and University of Pennsylvania joint fine arts program in 1937. In the late 1950s, she gradually moved from realism into geometrical abstraction that generated dazzling, and sometimes dizzying, optical effects. The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns 25 of her paintings, drawings and prints.
She began her career as an art teacher in Norfolk, Va., public schools and later taught at Tulane University. In 1941, she married architect Preston Andrade, who introduced her to the fields of architecture and design. During World War II, she was involved in a number of design projects, including creating posters and pamphlets for the war bond division of the Treasury Department. After moving to Philadelphia in 1946, Professor Andrade had her first major solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1954, and was hired at the Philadelphia College of Art in 1958.
Obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer
www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/17895674.html
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