Empowering Students to Succeed

Marcia Gloster Ammeen's Estate-Plan Gift to Further Support Her Endowed Scholarship

From her days spent drawing horses as a child, Marcia Gloster Ammeen 64 IL knew she wanted to be an artist. Influenced by older friends, she applied and was accepted to another college - but within days knew she had made a mistake.

"Making the change to RISD was a big decision," she says. "By that fall I knew I had landed in the right place, one that not only enhanced my skills as an artist but also that drove me intellectually. In my junior and senior years, I lived in an apartment. That independence, combined with the years of being immersed in the culture of RISD, was enormously gratifying. "I have always been proud to say I went to RISD."

Although her goal was to be a painter, she imagined she could better support herself by becoming an illustrator. "I grew up with the heavily illustrated magazines of the 1950s. But by the mid-'60s, illustration was being overtaken by photography," she recalls.

After refusing several secretary jobs in art departments, she was hired as an assistant to the art director at Brides Magazine. "That was my beginning, and my life as an art director took off from there. I worked in publishing in New York and London, eventually founding a small advertising agency that I ran for 25 years," she says. "About ten years ago I returned to painting and at the same time started writing." Her first book, 31 Days, is a memoir of a summer at an art school in Austria. I Love You Today tells the story of the difficulty of being a woman artist in the man's world of New York in the late 1960s. Voices from a Distant Room, also about an artist, is a paranormal romance that begins 5,000 years ago.

"I always hoped I could help the school that set me on my career and a life I love. I'm fortunate that I was able to establish an endowed scholarship so that aspiring artists can experience the RISD culture and strive to become successful in whatever medium they choose," she says. She recently updated her will to add to her endowed scholarship and leave a legacy for RISD.