Traer Price

Traer Price (b. 1964) is an African American artist and designer whose work has included the mediums of painting, graphic design, water feature design, and jewelry design. After graduating from Harvard, Price produced graphic design for Fortune 500 firms including Time, Inc. and American Express as well as prominent nonprofits like The United Negro College Fund. She attended New York’s Pratt Institute for graduate studies in graphic design followed by Stanford University and was mentored by renowned designers Sara Little Turnbull and Matt Kahn.

Upon completion of her MFA in Visual Design (1990), Price then integrated water, light and sound via computer to produce theatrical fountain design displays all over the world. Her projects included prominent shows at The Burj Khalifa, Dubai, UAE; the Fountains of Bellagio, Las Vegas; Tokyo Dome, Tokyo, Japan; the Fountain of Nations at EPCOT Center, Walt Disney World, Orlando; and Crown Casino, Melbourne, Australia.

Within the design industry, Price would produce promotional and exhibit graphics for leading corporate and non-profit clients including Volkswagen, Xerox, and Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium. In expanding her mediums into three dimensions, Price would also cast aluminum housewares with the AZCAST foundry and design firm in California, notably producing the eponymous Traer Bowl featured in Metropolitan Home. Her designs have also been featured and sold at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and similar institutions. After launching her own practice, Traer Price Design, Price expanded further into the design of adornment in metal, beads and cast glass sold online and across the United States including at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL and the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles.

Beginning in the 2000s Price began a focused drawing practice in small sketchbooks, as both counterpoint to the epic scale of fountain design and as visual dialog with not knowing. Emerging organically in abstract silhouettes and dense hatching, the recursive loop of marking, seeing, and responding serves as a way to touch into—and trust—the cusp of each now. Price’s fine ink drawings and related expressions on canvas often resemble entities or artifacts, symbolic portals to liminal spaces of bone-knowing where unseen energies guide without conceptual blueprint. Price’s fine art has featured in Tampa Bay’s Afrofuturist Festival 2024 and became part of celebrity collectors Rena and Andrikk Frazier’s holdings at the Black Art Gala 2025. Her writings are included in The Black Graphic Design History Collections Initiative at Stanford University. With imagery both ancient and alien, these distinct forms float in fields of color inspired by two vast landscapes of spiritual significance—the crystalline blue waters of her ancestral St. Croix, USVI and the red rock, rough-edged terrain of one of her adopted homelands, the desert of northern New Mexico.

Culture is a major influence on Price’s art, writings and design. As a Black woman of very light skin, as well as a New Englander with Southern and Caribbean roots, Price frequently explores the quintessentially American experience of being at the crossroads of multiple histories and identities. For more on Price’s unusual path, see her entry in the Black Graphic Design History Collections Initiative at Stanford University, which includes an essay on race and creativity written in honor of the Collection—From Colorism to Water Choreography: My Design Journey Inward. Price’s attraction to inner thresholds that produce freedom also honors her ancestors, including Rebecca and George Latimer and their son, Lewis Latimer, of light bulb fame, who were noted fugitives from enslavement, as well as the people, animals and environments that Price credits with revealing her truth.