Although she is generally identified as an abstract or figurative artist, her body of work defies definition,[2] and she never considered herself a member of any school or movement.

She remained reclusive in that she voluntarily removed herself from academic art and the commercial gallery system, showing only occasionally in one-woman and group exhibitions.

Her father was a chemical engineer working with vegetable fats and oils, and the family relocated for jobs throughout Indiana and in Chicago, Boston, and ultimately Memphis, where he was Vice President of Research and Production for Kraft.

She had never before witnessed discrimination and racism to the degree prevalent in the South during the time of Jim Crow laws, and they outraged her.

“That makes a difference no matter what type of art you’re involved with.”[6] Her best and most enduring friendships, including those with track stars John J. Cordova and one-time world-record holder Adolph Plummer, frequently originated outside artistic circles, though she also forged lifelong friendships with such classmates as Richard Masterson and Richard Hogan.

[6] Yet despite her private nature, she still included her work in more than two dozen exhibitions throughout her career: of her art, she said, “I still want it to exist in the world.”[6] Her styles vary, and her subjects include human figures, abstract checkered patterns, perfect circles, strangely mechanical sketches, trees, and emotions.

This collection of work showed several nameless people in various states of emotion, as well as pieces featuring figures from literature.

Her figurative expression of rage, of furious disappointment, of innocent elation, and sweet, pure joy made her work nurturing to all who saw it.

Her visual adventures with myth and pattern, the compassion of her art, the fellow feeling she had with all people struggling to make sense of the world and the most of their lives, her stand-up communion with people of hope and perseverance, these all made her an artist who served the mystery of ‘making new things,’ virtually every day, and who lived the kind of quiet life, off to one side, that made it possible.

Even when her own struggles overwhelmed her, at times, she never gave up on what it means to be us, as we are, creatures of insight and kindness, flawed to the quick, but worth the best all of us can give.

The two attended the University of New Mexico simultaneously in the previous decade, but did not meet until both were working with the Westinghouse Learning Corporation.

Rini Price continued making her art nearly every day, even during the early years of her dementia, until the condition made creating impossible.

After nearly five years of advancing dementia, during much of which her husband served as her primary caregiver, she died of respiratory failure at Lovelace Hospital in Albuquerque on October 19, 2019.