About the Artist

Gates received her BFA in Art and her MA in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Massachusetts. Through the years she has continued studying painting with a number of landscape painters, and she has done advanced work at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston/Tufts University. For decades she worked for a federal agency in the west and southwest. Her job provided opportunities for living and working in national parks and protected areas, and working on international assignments. All of these places, with their amazing landscapes, peoples, cultural traditions, and deep histories have informed her paintings. Now Gates paints full-time. Since 2015 she has been a resident artist at River Oaks Square Arts Center in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Gates’s work has been juried into a number of regional and national competitions over the past 25 years including ArtFields (12-state, juried) and the Alexandria Museum of Art’s September Competition (international, juried). Her work has won numerous awards. She has exhibited in group and solo shows in the southeast. Her work is in private and institutional collections in the United States and several foreign countries.

Gates and her work have been featured in “Art Rocks” (Louisiana Public Broadcasting, episode 517) and Louisiana Life magazine (January-February 2019). She is a member of the Oil Painters of America.

And she really does get outside whenever she can!