The Golden Gate International Exposition

Peavy presented thirty paintings at the GGIE’s Temple of Religion and Tower of Peace in San Francisco. It was the West Coast counterpart to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which also included large exhibits of contemporary art.  Four of the panels from her Prince of Peace were large (each approximately four by six feet) and the portrait studies of biblical characters were smaller (fourteen by twelve inches).

In her choice of themes and interpretations, Peavy encouraged unity of reflection, pacificism, gender, race, and philosophies related to lost hermetic traditions. With these works, Peavy aimed to reframe our understanding of Biblical figures, presenting them as archetypes of higher meaning that had been misrepresented by patriarchal systems throughout history. These figures with dark skin were a reference to José Vasconcelos’s notions of a future Cosmic Race that would create a new civilization known as Universópolis.

Beginning in the late 1930s she immersed her figures in translucent bands of color, and from the 1960s to 1980s, she added abstracted crystals. Obliterating the notion of time, she continued to rework and transform canvases over some six decades.