Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.
Charles Marion Russell, also known as C. M. Russell, Charlie Russell, and "Kid" Russell, was an American artist of the American Old West. He created more than 2,000 paintings of cowboys, Native Americans, and landscapes set in the western United States and in Alberta, Canada, in addition to bronze sculptures. He is known as "the cowboy artist" and was also a storyteller and author. He became an advocate for Native Americans in the west, supporting the bid by landless Chippewa to have a reservation established for them in Montana. In 1916, Congress passed legislation to create the Rocky Boy Reservation.
Rhoda Holmes Nicholls was an English-American watercolor and oil painter, born in Coventry, England. She studied art in England and Italy, and her work was viewed and praised at the time by the queens of both countries. A body of work was created in South Africa by Nicholls of Port Elizabeth area's scenery, wildlife and architecture. She lived there on her brothers' 25,000-acre ostrich farm for one year.
Ruth Van Sickle Ford was an American painter, art teacher, and owner of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. She credited artists George Bellows, who influenced her interest in social realism, and John Carlson, who founded the School of Landscape Painting in Woodstock, New York, with helping her to develop her talent. She traveled and made paintings in the United States, Caribbean and South America. An award-winner, her works are in many permanent public and private collections. A book has been written about her entitled Warm Light, Cool Shadows: The Life and Art of Ruth Van Sickle Ford.
Elizabeth Nourse was a realist-style genre, portrait, and landscape painter born in Mt. Healthy, Ohio, in the Cincinnati area. She also worked in decorative painting and sculpture. Described by her contemporaries as "the first woman painter of America" and "the dean of American woman painters in France and one of the most eminent contemporary artists of her sex," Nourse was the first American woman to be voted into the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She also had the honor of having one of her paintings purchased by the French government and included in the Luxembourg Museum's permanent collection. Nourse's style was described by Los Angeles critic Henry J. Seldis as a "forerunner of social realist painting." Some of Nourse's works are displayed at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Elenore Plaisted Abbott (1875–1935) was an American book illustrator, scenic designer, and painter. She illustrated early 20th-century editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales,Robinson Crusoe, and Kidnapped. Several books were published as illustrated by Elenore Plaisted Abbott and Helen Alden Knipe.
Gladys M. Nilsson is an American artist, and one of the original Hairy Who Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists active during the 1960s and 1970s. She is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Jim Nutt.
Hilda Goldblatt Gorenstein (1905–1998) was an American oil painter and watercolorist. A native of Montreal, Canada, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, U.S. Gorenstein started painting as a teenager at a time when women artists weren't very well received. A reflection of the times in which she lived, she signed her work "Hilgos", an androgynous professional working name. She was later the inspiration for the documentary film, I Remember Better When I Paint.
Ellen Lanyon was a painter and printmaker from Chicago, Illinois. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), her MFA from the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History and studied restoration at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She also received an honorary doctorate from SAIC. Her works are in the permanent collections of many major American museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Ulrich Museum.
Enella Benedict was an American realism and landscape painter. She taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a founder and director for nearly 50 years for the Art School at the Hull House.
Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones was an American painter who lived in New York City, Philadelphia, and Paris, France. She had a successful career as a painter at the turn of the century, exhibiting her works internationally and winning awards. She had a mental breakdown that caused a break in her career, and she returned to have a successful second career, creating modern watercolor paintings. She was a resident at three artist colonies, with notable artists, writers, and musicians. Sparhawk-Jones' works are in American art museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Museum of Modern Art.
Adelaide Deming was an American painter, associated for much of her life with Litchfield, Connecticut. She was the 1908 winner of the Beal Prize for her watercolor Moon Shadows.
Roberta Lee Raymond, néeRoberta Wolin, also known as Bobbie Raymond, was an American actress, sociologist, civil rights worker, artist, and writer. She was married to mathematician Richard Gustavus Larson, PhD and had one son Charles D. Raymond, and a grandson Trevor William Raymond.
Eve Sonneman is an American photographer and artist.
Rowena Fry was an American painter.
Pamela Helena Wilson is an American artist. She is best known for watercolor drawings and paintings derived from photographs, largely of news events, architectural forms and landscapes. Her journalistic sources frequently portray scenes of natural and human-made calamity and the conflict, devastation and reactions that follow, often involving teeming crowds and demonstrations. Wilson's process and visual editing obscure these events, translating the images into suggestive, new visual experiences with greater urgency, universality and an open-endedness that plays against expectations. In 2013, critic Michelle Grabner wrote, "The luminosity of watercolor on white paper and the alluring atmospheric effects [Wilson] achieves in this medium creates images that are neither photographic or illustrational but seductively abstract and representational."
Pauline Lennards Palmer was an American artist based in Chicago.
Scribner Ames (1908–1993) was an American artist known for her paintings and sculpture. Her paintings included portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and abstractions. Her portrait sitters were often children or well-known men and women in the performing arts. Born and raised in Chicago, she worked first in Manhattan and later returned to her birth city. She also made repeated trips to Europe and, once, to the West Indies. Although she admired the work of Cézanne, Braque, and Marsden Hartley, her painting was, as one critic said, "not derivative". Critics noted her effective handling of color and one said she was "particularly noted for her work in creating movement through space by the use of color perspective." In her carved wood sculpture, critics generally noted the influence of her teacher, José de Creeft.
Dorothy Loeb (1877–1971) was an American artist known for her easel art, prints, and murals. She traveled widely in the United States, Mexico, and overseas, residing and working for the most part in Chicago, Manhattan, Eastern Massachusetts, and the State of Querétaro in Mexico. She was also a children's art teacher and proponent of progressive education. Having received training at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York and having studied with artists in Munich and Paris, she adopted a variety of styles, ranging from representative to highly abstract, and worked in a variety of media including oil on canvas, oil on heavy coated paper, watercolor and ink on paper, and monotype printing. She exhibited in prominent museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Worcester Art Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. She also showed a mural at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Most critics responded favorably to her work but not all. At one extreme, a reviewer called her work "the very best in the new art movement" while at the other, a critic said it was "dull, stiff, and lifeless".
Judith Raphael is an American figurative painter and educator based in Chicago. She is known for provocative depictions of childhood, particularly contemporary girlhood and its passage toward adulthood. This work emerged in the wake of feminism, and in style and content, was influenced by figurative painters such as Paula Rego, Balthus and Lucian Freud. Her paintings often recast heroic art-historical portrayals of men with contemporary girls in order to redress the paucity of strong female icons in Western art. Writer Carol Becker said of Raphael's later portraits, "[her] girls are different races and sizes, and each one’s face and posture is unique, but they share attitude. Although they are hip, they seem not yet secure in who they are or what they are about; they appear to be trying to construct their identities."
