Evelyn Patricia Terry at Lynden Sculpture Garden in Milwaukee

Evelyn Patricia Terry is a full time professional visual artist, presenter, writer and art collector based in Milwaukee. She works across many media: printmaking, drawing, painting, installation, and public art. During her long career, she has garnered awards, fellowships, grants, and commendations for community work with students and other artists. Concentrating on printmaking, she earned both a BFA and an MS in Visual Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). She earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after Ruth Milofsky, a UWM arts education professor and mentor, set up a fund to give her a deadline to go back to school so she might be better prepared as an artist.

In 2012, Terry received the Wisconsin Visual Artist Lifetime Achievement Award from a Wisconsin consortium of art and humanity organizations. In 2014 the Milwaukee Arts Board honored her with their Artist of the Year Award. Terry’s work is internationally exhibited and collected; over 400 private, corporate, and public collections own her artwork including the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, the Racine Art Museum and the Wright Museum of Art at Beloit College. From 2016 through 2018, several universities—including UWM, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Duke University--acquired Terry’s hand-constructed artists’ books. In 2009, influenced by Dr. Margaret Burroughs, a visual artist, poet, and founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History, and by Chicago art consultant Susan Woodson, Terry founded the Terry McCormick Contemporary Fine and Folk Art Gallery, a home-based gallery, following the death of her partner, self-taught folk artist George Ray McCormick, Sr.