Alice Berry has worked exclusively as an independent clothing designer for thirty years, earning her degree in fine art in 1980 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

To create the color scarf line, Alice works with translating concepts from Abstract Expressionist painters such as Josef Albers, Mark Rothko and others. This work has been recognized by various museums around the country such as the Philadelphia Museum, National Academy of Design, and the Weisman Museum, among others.

Alice Berry Studio was a retail presence on Chicago's Gold Coast in the 2000's with a dedicated store within the boutique Only She, and later in her own salon in Tree Studios.  In 2008, Alice was the first independent designer to have a showing within Fashion focus, Chicago's fashion week, (to see video from the show please go here)

Having discontinued the clothing line in 2010, Alice is continuing to produce the scarf and shawl color line, as well as a series of hand silkscreened fabric designs on a variety of materials, including wool and tencel jersey, sateen linings, charmeuse satins and chiffons. This screened yardage has motifs/symbols and poems/text drawn and written by Alice, and the studio is incorporating it into shawls, T-shirts, and the linings of one-of-a-kind garments.   

Artistic Statement

Sometimes it takes a while to find the work that resonates with who you are. As for me, after years of making clothing for private clients as well as for the retail market, I came to my scarf line as if by process of elimination. Coming out of baby land from the birth of my son, I found the only requests from the stores I had been working with were for the scarves I had begun to do as a sideline a few years before. As I developed the line, I found myself understanding the relationships between colors and textures in a much more profound way, and I began to look with a fresh eye at the work of the abstract expressionists such as Rothko, Rhinehart, Louis, etc., as well as the work of the artists and designers of the postwar bauhaus , particularly Josef and Anni Albers, who systematized a way of looking at color that was logical, as well as encompassing the emotional experience of really considering color. Over the past several years I have come to realize that color is experiential, and belongs to the same realm of experience as listening to music. I think color and light are related to each other in the same way that music and sound are related. The seeing of light or the hearing of sound is essentially the perception of vibrations by the ear or the eye. In working with the colors in relationships as I do, I think of them as compositions working in the same way as a group of notes creates a chord or a phrase of music. Thinking of this I realized that many of the same terms describing color and music are interchangeable. One refers to tonal or atonal musical compositions, or harmonious or discordant colors. I continue to explore and be amazed by the relationships between colors and the idea of color in the world, and I hope to learn new ways to express it through my work