Raeford Liles

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Raeford Liles

Raeford Bailey Liles (born 1923 in Birmingham) is an artist.

Liles was the third of four sons born to a South Central Bell employee. He enrolled at Birmingham-Southern College in 1941 and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943, serving as a fighter pilot aboard the U.S.S. Essex. He returned to BSC after World War II, but transferred to Auburn University before completing his bachelor of science in electrical engineering in 1949. While at Auburn, Liles pursued a minor in fine art, studying onder Basil Cimino and Maltby Sykes. He married Elsa Allgood in Birmingham and the couple moved to Paris, France where he continued to study art at Atelier Fernand Leger under the GI Bill. His style evolved from expressionist and cubist-inspired work to abstract expressionism and action painting.

In 1951 the Lileses moved to Orleans. Elsa was employed as a secretary at the U.S. Army headquarters there and Liles pursued a career as an artist. His first solo exhibition was mounted at Galerie 8 in Paris that year. The couple returned to Paris in 1953 where he accepted employment as an engineer for the US Army while continuing to paint in the evenings. Over the next three years he had exhibitions in Paris and Helsinki and he and his wife produced two daughters. He took up the medium of spray paint in a series of spontaneous paintings.

In 1957 Liles suffered a mental breakdown and was treated for schizophrenia at the Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center. He and Elsa divorced shortly after his release in 1959. He went back to work for the Army, but sought mental health treatment again, at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, in 1960. He was granted a medical discharge from his Army service in 1961 and moved to New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.

In the 1960s, Liles' art took on political themes addressing civil rights and pacifism. His 1967 show at the East Hampton Gallery was entitled "Angry Art Vietnam". In the 1970s he volunteered for the New York City Ballet and produced a series of works inspired by dance. The Birmingham Museum of Art organized an exhibition of his work in 1973 and it was through connections there that he met fellow Birmingham native Sylvia Pizitz, who was also living in New York. They became traveling companions and married in 1989. Their experiences in the eastern Mediterranean inspired Liles to produce a series of collages based on ancient Greek and Egyptian motifs.

In the 1980s Liles began experimenting with sculpture, building minimalist towers from acrylic and even from LEGO blocks. while also extending his collage series with erotic scenes based on near-Eastern and East Asian precedents.

After Pizitz's death in January 1991 Liles began traveling with another Birmingham-born companion, Virginia Pitts Rembert. They lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and traveled extensively before they retired to Birmingham's Danberry at Inverness apartments in 2005. Liles work was exhibited in a major retrospective at Jennifer Harwell Gallery in 2007. Virginia died in 2013.

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