ABSTRACT
Peter Rice, the acclaimed theatre designer and artist, died suddenly in December 2015, aged 86. It was a shock. It came out of the blue. We were working on an exhibition about his life and work and about the life and work of his wife Pat Albeck, another leading designer. In his becoming ‘the late Peter Rice’, our sense of the meaning of this work subtly changed. The event of Peter Rice’s death was unforeseen. He was in good health; indeed, only a couple of weeks previously he had been visiting us in order to co-design the exhibition space in the way that only a veteran of stage design could – by scoping the environment and then building a three-dimensional model of it. The notion of a multi-layered ‘arts dividend’ returned from investment in arts and cultural activity, widely enjoyed and widely shared, has become enshrined in cultural policy.
