Terry Plater enjoyed a fulfilling career in higher education before earning an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2023. Prior to that, with degrees in architecture and city and regional planning, she worked and traveled widely in the US and abroad. That work and travel often figures significantly in her portraits and landscapes.
A lifelong painter raised in a family that valued art, literature, and music, Plater likes to say that art chose her. Her natural curiosity, her wide range of professional experiences, and her extensive work-related travel in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe infuse her art practice with a sense of beauty, urgency, and a search for equanimity. Her work, including her current project on her family history, centers on questions of equity and aesthetics; in painting she continually asks if and how the two conditions can be reconciled.
Other exhibits include...
Solo exhibition Harriet’s World at the Schweinfurth Art Center and the Cayuga Historical Society in Auburn, New York (2021)
A finalist citation in the 2022 AXA/Art prize cohort for “Night Picnic"
Commissioned in 2022 by Cornell University Law School to paint a 6’ x 6’ portrait of Mr. George Washington Fields, a man who, born into slavery in Virginia, was Cornell Law’s first African American graduate, class of 1896. That painting now hangs in the Penalver Foyer in Cornell’s Law School.
This year in 2025
The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina (“Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid,” May – October)
Roberson Museum in Binghamton, New York (“Quinquennial Exhibition of Central and Southern Tier Artists,” May – September).
In addition, she will show her work at the Ulysees Philomathic Library in Trumansburg NY (July-August), and at the CAP ART Space in Ithaca NY (October).
