Emerson Burkhart (1905 –1969) was an American artist based in Columbus, Ohio.
Emerson Burkhart was born on a farm in Union Township near Kalida, Ohio in 1905. After attending Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, Burkhart moved to Provincetown on Cape Cod, studying with artist Charles Hawthorne. By 1931, Burkhart moved to Columbus to teach at the Ohio School of Art. In 1939, he married Mary-Ann Martin, a famous model who would later become an artist herself. Mary-Ann was a model for several well known artists in New York including Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Eugene Speicher. [1]
From his house on Woodland Avenue, Burkhart quickly established himself to be a “Columbus Institution.” Burkhart became known for his portraits and street scenes of Columbus. It is estimated Burkhart painted 3,000 pieces during his 40-year-career, many of these portraits of Ohio residents whom he would pay a small fee. He even painted a portrait of famed writer Carl Sandburg, who was a friend of his.
In 1934, Emerson Burkhart received a commission from the WPA Federal Art Project for a mural over the auditorium at Central High School in Columbus. The Federal Art Project intended to give artists like Burkhart employment during the Great Depression and provide art for non-federal government buildings. Burkhart created a 13’ by 70’ mural, known as Music, featuring young women and men dancing and playing musical instruments. Just four years later, in 1938, the principal ordered that the mural be painted over as “it was too sexy.” Starting in 1999, over the course of six years, 1,000 art students from the Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center, under the supervision of art conservators, worked to remove the paint that once covered the mural. After its restoration, the mural was installed at Greater Columbus Convention Center. [2]
In 1938, Burkhart received his second commission from the WPA for ten life size murals at Stillman Hall on the Ohio State University campus and he was paid $1,209 for 13 months of work. Each mural featured important historical figures like Walt Whitman and David Thoreau. Burkhart connected the content of his murals to the function of the building, which served as the social work building. In one mural titled Elizabethan Court Life, Burkhart contrasted the life of the wealthy privileged class with those of the working class. The murals are still located in the building today.
After the death of his wife in 1955, Burkhart traveled the world with the International School of America as an Artist-in-Residence. After several years of travel, Burkhart returned to Columbus and continued painting local residents and scenes. Burkhart died in his home in November 1969. [3]
Anton Refregier a painter and muralist active in Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project commissions, and in teaching art. He was a Russian immigrant to the United States.
Harry Sternberg was an American painter, printmaker and educator. He was born in New York City on July 19, 1904 and died in Escondido, California on November 27, 2001.
William Penhallow Henderson was an American painter, architect, and furniture designer.
James Michael Newell was a gold medaled WPA artist, best known for his fresco murals. He was born in Carnegie, Pennsylvania into a large Irish family. His birth name was James Erbin Newell but he changed it when becoming an artist. He had one child with his first wife, Emma Greaves. His daughter Patricia Ann Newell was born in 1927. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.
The Williamsburg Houses, originally called the Ten Eyck Houses, is a public housing complex built and operated by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. It consists of 20 buildings on a site bordered by Scholes, Maujer, and Leonard Streets and Bushwick Avenue.
Louise Emerson Ronnebeck was an American painter best known for her murals executed for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Born in Philadelphia she married artist Arnold Ronnebeck (1885–1947) in 1926 and they settled in Denver, Colorado. In Denver she built a successful career documenting western American history and social issues of the 1930s and 1940s.
Fletcher Martin, was an American painter, illustrator, muralist and educator. He is best known for his images of military life during World War II and his sometimes brutal images of boxing and other sports.
Paul Raphael Meltsner (1905–1966) was an American artist who was widely recognized for his Works Progress Administration (WPA) era paintings and lithographs, and who was later known for his iconic portraits of celebrities in the performing arts.
Woodland Park is a residential neighborhood located in the Near East Side of Columbus, Ohio that houses approximately 1,500 residents. The neighborhood was previously home to such figures as artist Emerson Burkhart, cartoonist Billy Ireland, and judge William Brooks. Established in the early 20th century, Woodland Park has grown from its planned neighborhood roots into a modest neighborhood that contains various faith communities, schools, sources of entertainment and recreation, and borders an extension of the Ohio State University medical center.
Louis Frederick Grell was an American figure composition and portrait artist based in the Tree Studio resident artist colony in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He received his formal training in Europe from 1900 through 1915 and later became art professor at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts from 1916 to 1922, and at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1922 to 1934. Grell exhibited his works throughout Europe from 1905 to 1915, in San Francisco in 1907, and in Chicago at the Art Institute 25 times from 1917 to 1941. He exhibited in New York in 1915 and 1916 and in Philadelphia and Washington DC. Primarily an allegorical and figurative composition muralist and portrait painter, his creative strokes adorn the ceilings and walls of numerous US National Historic Landmark buildings.
Edna Reindel (1894–1990) was a subtle Surrealist and American Regionalist painter, printmaker, illustrator, sculptor, muralist, and teacher active from the 1920s to the 1960s. She is best known for her work in large-scale murals, New England landscapes, and later for her commissioned work of women workers in WWII shipyard and aircraft industries as published in Life magazine in 1944.
Jay Datus (1914–1974) was an American artist known primarily for his mural painting in Arizona.
Ross Embrose Moffett was an American artist specializing in landscape painting, social realism themed murals and etching. He was a significant figure in the development of American Modernism after World War I. He worked with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to complete four murals in the 1930s. For the most part, his paintings depict the life and landscapes of the Provincetown, Massachusetts area.
Rainey Bennett was an American artist, illustrator and muralist. His works have been displayed in major museum art collections.
Helen Katharine Forbes was a Californian artist and arts educator specializing in etching, murals and painting. She is best known for western landscapes, portrait paintings, and her murals with the Treasury Section of Fine Arts and Work Progress Administration (WPA). Forbes was skilled in painting in oil, watercolor, and egg tempera. She painted landscapes of Mexico, Mono Lake and the Sierras in the 1920s, desert scenes of Death Valley in the 1930s, and portraits and still-lifes.
Olga Mohr (1905–1955) was an American artist who worked in various mediums including painting, ceramics and weaving. She was one of the WPA′s Section of Fine Arts artists and created the post office mural for Stilwell, Oklahoma. She was also in charge of the Federal Art Project for the Cincinnati public schools and was the only female member of the New Group of Cincinnati Artists, who studied and exhibited modern art in Ohio during the decade preceding World War II.
Fay Elizabeth Davis was an American artist, graphic designer and muralist who created three post office murals as part of the art projects for the New Deal's Section of Painting and Sculpture.
Andrene Kauffman was an American painter and educator who created a mural for the post office mural project in Ida Grove, Iowa. She completed twenty-five murals and seven sculptures throughout Chicago, as part of the art projects for the New Deal's Section of Painting and Sculpture. Later, she completed seventeen ceramic murals for the 3rd Unitarian Church, which was designated as a Chicago Landmark in 1960. In addition to her artwork and exhibitions, Kauffman taught art for forty-one years at various universities in Chicago, Rockford, Illinois and Valparaiso, Indiana.
Jessie Hull Mayer was an American painter and muralist who won four federal commissions to complete post office murals, as part of the Section of Painting and Sculpture′s projects, later called the Section of Fine Arts, of the Treasury Department. She continued to paint after the WPA project ended focusing on botanicals, landscapes and maritime themes.
Vernon Herbert Coleman was a marine seascape muralist artist and art teacher on Cape Cod. He painted more than 100 murals for the Works Progress Administration.