Eunice Lulu Parsons, a prominent collagist, painter, printmaker, and teacher who moved from Chicago to Portland in about 1940 and stayed here for the rest of her life, died in Portland on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024. She was 108 years old.

“Another door closes … Oregon/Northwest’s longest-lived artist and Scrabble-player is gone,” Bruce Guenther, former chief curator of the Portland Art Museum, said via email on Sunday. “I am saddened to report the loss of another witness to the world that we have lived. Artist (painting and collage), faculty at Museum Art School, and lifelong Scrabble player. She died peacefully.”  

Parsons, who was born in 1916 in Loma, Colorado, and moved with her family to Chicago as a child, gravitated to the art world early, taking children’s art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and then, as a young woman, studying art at the University of Chicago.

She was a rare link to an earlier generation of Oregon artists that helped form the region’s aesthetic personality. Married in 1936 to Allen Herbert Jensen, a Merchant Marine, she raised her three children mostly by herself during the later years of the Depression and World War II. “This experience taught her to be independent and frugal,” curator Bonnie Liang-Malcolmson wrote for a 2012 exhibition of Parsons’ work at the Portland Art Museum.

Left: Eunice Lulu Parsons, self-portrait at 50, etching, 1966. Right: Eunice Parsons, “Sport (for the fun of it),” collage, 2011. Photos via The Art of Eunice Parsons.

Left: Eunice Parsons, “Child’s Play,” collage, 2008. Right: Eunice Parsons, “Scrabble, Anyone?,” collage, 2011. Photos via The Art of Eunice Parsons.

“Edges are the story of my life,” Jennifer Antonson quotes Parsons in her entry on the artist in The Oregon Encyclopedia. Antonson continues: “A painter, tilemaker, and printmaker, she is best known for collages, the art form ‘where we see edges and relationships’ come together. Her artwork might include posters, silkscreens, ticket stubs, packaging materials, or old magazine covers that demonstrate the interplay of words and phrases. ‘Collage lets me use my love for words, concrete and abstract,’ she said. ‘The detritus of our contemporary culture, posters picked up in my travels, are all grist for the mill.’ During the 1960s and 1970s, Parsons was one of the few female instructors at the Portland Museum Art School, where her honest and direct style had a strong influence on her students.”

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Parsons, sometimes known as Eunice Jensen Parsons (she and Jensen divorced in 1960), eventually took up her art studies again, beginning classes at the Museum Art School. “Encouraged by a neighbor who noticed Parsons drawing at every opportunity,” Laing-Malcomson wrote, “she enrolled at the Museum Art School (now Pacific Northwest College of Art) in 1950. There she was introduced to artists who would influence her development, especially Kurt Schwitters, Robert Motherwell, and Clifford Gleason.”

“We lost a great one this week,” artist and teacher Mark Andres wrote on Facebook. “If you do not know who Eunice Parsons was, you can find out by watching a film I helped produce when she was 90. She lived to be 108.” The video, produced by Portland Community College, is above.

Her Museum Art School teachers proved to be significant influences on her career, too: In her time at the school she took classes from a Northwest who’s-who of mid-20th century artist/teachers, among them Charles Voorheis, William Givler, Louis Bunce, and Jack McLarty. As Antonson wrote in The Oregon Encyclopedia, “’When I was 18 years old I gave up on art,’ she told an interviewer when she was in her nineties. ‘Life began again at the Museum Art School at age 34.’”

Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit wrote in their book Oregon Painters: Landscape to Modernism, 1859-1959: “As she was finishing her art education, ‘abstract expressionism was arriving on the scene in Portland in a way that couldn’t be ignored.’ She discovered her way into abstraction by working with silk-screen prints. The colors all required different screens, so the series of shapes appear sequentially. Parsons discovered collage later, when again, the shapes captured her imagination. She felt the medium was returning her full circle to the paintings that began her career.”

For many years Parsons balanced her own artwork with a teaching career: She was on the faculty of the Museum Art School — teaching, as Laing-Malcomson noted, from 1957 until she retired in 1979, with a year’s break to teach art at Portland State University. And she was a founding member in 2005 of the Portland artist-run 12×16 Gallery, which continued until 2017.

Along the way she developed a distinct style of her own.

“(C)ollage is an art of destroying one thing to create another, splicing excerpts from many discourses, and jumbling the formerly ordered into a new, often chaotic unity,” the late Roger Hull, curator, art professor, and chronicler of the artists and artworks of the Pacific Northwest, wrote for an exhibition of Parsons’ work at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem. “In these ways, collage does seem to reflect the splintery static of contemporary life. For the Portland artist Eunice Parsons, collage involves a particularly vital interplay of words, images, textures, shapes, and colors that mingle the new and the nostalgic, the present experience and the remembered time or place.

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“… Her first collages were studies for paintings and prints, but she soon realized that the studies were often complete visual statements in their own right. The chance viewing of a collage by the New York artist Anne Ryan in the collection of her friend Louis Bunce confirmed her belief that the medium was its own legitimate art form. ‘It was all over,’ Parsons recalls, and collage became her favored and eventually exclusive medium. In a conversation in May 2009, she stated: ‘I love the torn edge — and the cut edge. I love edges. I love paper. It’s a passion.'”

During her long and extraordinary life Parsons spent more than eight decades in Portland, but her eyes always took in what was happening in the larger world, too. She traveled by bus to New York and Washington, D.C., to take in the new art of abstract expressionism and other forms. She led Portland State University students on trips to Europe. As Laing-Malcolmson noted, she was an avid traveler: “(S)he led numerous trips to Western Europe and China for Museum Art School students, friends, and family. … She continuously collected collage materials and found inspiration while exploring the world.”

And as Antonson noted, she rarely stopped: “In 2016, at the Roll-Up Photo Studio Gallery in southeast Portland, Parsons celebrated her hundredth birthday with Eunice Parsons, La Centenaire, an exhibition of collage works created from 2006 to 2016.”

Then, too, as Guenther pointed out, there was her lifelong passion for Scrabble — a game of letters, broken down and reassembled into new patterns. Much, as it turns out, like collage, that other, larger, passion of her long and well-lived life.

Bob Hicks

Bob Hicks has been covering arts and culture in the Pacific Northwest since 1978, including 25 years at The Oregonian. Among his art books are Kazuyuki Ohtsu; James B. Thompson: Fragments in Time; and Beth Van Hoesen: Fauna and Flora. His work has appeared in American Theatre, Biblio, Professional Artist, Northwest Passage, Art Scatter, and elsewhere. He also writes the daily art-history series "Today I Am."