Bernice Massé Rosenthal
1938 – 2022
Bernice took leave of our world in January after a brief illness. She left sorrowful friends and family and a legacy of art.
Trained as a nurse, she left her native western Massachusetts to be an R.N. in Boston. There she met a number of artists and found art to be her real calling. Bernice enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts majoring in stone sculpture and painting. She won a fifth year traveling fellowship that took her to Greece where there was plenty of stone for inspiration.
She became a paper conservator and applied those skills to collage. Cast off wooden shapes, abandoned on the sidewalk or cutoffs from a boatshop, were fashioned into the wood assemblages for which she is known. Bernice’s body of work also includes a host of drawings, painting, weavings, stained glass and public art, much of which can be seen here.
It is the intention of her family to maintain this website and assemble her work for show from time to time. Bernice’s creative legacy will be maintained and can be seen here.