Jessica Rice was born in Antwerp, Belgium. As a young child she moved to the Belgian Congo spending many years in Central Africa. After immigrating to the United States, she graduated from the San Francisco Academy of Art where she was awarded the prestigious Flax Scholarship. Her paintings reflected a distinct African influence: landscapes, street markets, carnival and beach scenes and other genre subjects. In the early Seventies, Ms. Rice's style underwent a radical change as she began to draw inspiration from a variety of early Twentieth Century European avant-garde abstract movements, which the artist has blended into a vibrant and uniquely personal form of expression.