Dr. Angiola Maria-Riva Churchill passed away Tuesday, June 16th, at home, Forest Hills Queens, New York. She was 104 years old.
Born in Manhattan April 30th, 1922, at just months old, she and her mother moved to Italy, returning in 1934.
As a child she navigated both the social and economic milieu of Europe and urban environments in America. A latent visual artist her entire life, ‘Angie’ lived thereafter through exposure to scenes of our most significant modernist art developments, with proximity to seminal worldwide events of the 20th century proper.
This exposure shaped core tenets of her character. Through war alongside its aftermath, and cultural shifts over those following decades, she was consummate member of ‘The Greatest Generation’.
As such her life and times befit the finest of role models. Her personality was an integral conduit for the dedicated career of highly effective teaching.
An ‘artist-educator’ then, while in orbit to the rise of a New York City centered art world, she availed herself to concurrent advents of arts education development unparalleled in scholarly research at the time.
Dr. Churchill developed a distinct sensibility of instilling expansive, inclusive predilection to humanism in a life of ideas to all she met.
Professionally, she wielded fierce polemics to reinforce and protect an individual’s creative identity; at once thoroughly modern and unabashedly academic.
All who experienced her art, both painting and paper installation, intuited similar aesthetic.
In 2003 she was predeceased by her husband of 54 years, Walter Churchill.
She is survived by her nieces, Deborah Prieto and Lenore Indell her nephew Arthur Riva their spouses and children
with family still in Italy who cherish and extol her memory.
