b. 1912 d. 1988
Site Affiliation: Eames House
Ray Eames, born Bernice Alexandra Kaiser in Sacramento, California, came to design through a rigorous formation in the visual arts. After relocating to New York, she studied under Hans Hofmann — a pivotal figure in the transmission of European abstraction to American practice — and became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group. Her grounding in Hofmann’s theories of color, structure, and spatial composition proved foundational to the aesthetic language of the Eames Office, shaping everything from the palette of the fiberglass shell chairs to the graphic sensibility of the office’s films and exhibitions. Though her contributions were systematically overlooked during her lifetime, Ray functioned as a full creative partner in the collaboration — a distortion that subsequent scholarship has worked to correct. She continued directing the Eames Office after Charles’s death in 1978, and died on August 21, 1988, ten years to the day after him.
Primary Medium: Design
Primary Stylistic Term: Mid-Century Modern
HAHS Affiliations: Ray and Charles Eames were also associated with Saarinen House.
Fun Fact: Ray never considered herself to have given up painting after cofounding the Eames Office. When a young woman asked her in 1982 how it felt to give up painting, she replied simply: “I never gave up painting; I just changed my palette.”
Recommended Publications: An Eames Primer by Eames Demetrios (2001); An Eames Anthology by Charles and Ray Eames, edited by Daniel Ostroff (2015); The Eames Houses: Charles and Ray Eames Residential Architecture by Eckart Maise (2026)