Patience Haley (1926-2020) was a visual artist who earned an A.B. at Oberlin and did advanced study at Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. During her first residency at MacDowell, she met painter Panos Ghikas at a reception in Savidge Library. The two ended up leaving MacDowell together, returning to the library in December of 1963 to be married. They lived and worked in Boston for more than 40 years, maintaining studios in the historic Fenway Studio Block and worked in one of John Singer Sargent's studios on Exeter Street.
Haley and Ghikas collaborated on the restoration of two Barry Faulkner murals at the family estate of former New York Governor W. Averill Harriman, Arden House, and another at Keene State University. That work led to commissions, including a mural in gold leaf completed in 1980 that adorned the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World restaurant. Haley taught art at Abbot Academy, the George Walter Smith Museum in Massachusetts, and at Middlebury College in Vermont, and was awarded grants and Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Bunting Institute, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, MacDowell, and Yaddo Foundation.
Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the De Cordova Museum, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Smith College Museum, Wesleyan University Center for the Arts, Lehigh University, Colby College, and the Bunting Institute.
