SELECTIONS from the American Museum of Photography™

Marie Riggins Higbee Avery (U.S., 1892-1980): Valley with Flowering Branches

Brown-toned platinum print, circa 1922

 

Marie Riggins was a student of Clarence H. White at Columbia University in 1919 and 1920. Her Ph.D. dissertation, “Modern Pictorial Photography and the Measure of Its Art” (Western Reserve University, 1943) includes “A Word Picture of Clarence White’s School of Photography at Canaan, Connecticut in the early 1920’s.”

An artist, photographer, and art educator, Riggins was also known as “Laurel Marie Riggins” and “Laurelle Marie Riggins.” In the 1930s she studied painting with Hans Hofmann and her photographs were exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In later years, she was an active supporter of the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine, serving as Secretary of the Rhine Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man in North Carolina.