“Rini understood as deeply as any artist in the Western tradition the full emotional range of what it means to be a human being. All her creative life, she explored her feelings and those of her friends and family. She was always on the move in the landscape of the psyche, both her own, as it ‘showed up’ beneath her pencils and brushes, and the psyches and lives of women and men unfolding through the crucibles of history and personality. 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. Rini always used to joke about ‘the species,’ the human species, which she trusted to be exactly what it is and what it turns out to be, nothing more or nothing other. When history turned inexplicable and absurd as it always does, she’d wave her arms and shake her head and say, with mock authority, ‘It’s the species.’ For Rini, the feminist and human rights activist, humanity was her ‘subject matter,’ and her devoted and tenderest concern. 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.”

- V. B. Price, poet, journalist, and Rini’s husband of 50 years