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Kathleen Blackshear Signed Wood Block Print - Lionfish
Kathleen Blackshear - Lionfish - signed Wood Block Printing. Titled and signed in pencil. Image size is 7.5 by 9.5 inches. Paper size is 9 by 12.5 inches.
Unframed.
Very good condition save for a small water mark in lower edge.
BLACKSHEAR, KATHLEEN (1897-1988). Kathleen Blackshear, artist and teacher, was born in Navasota, Texas, on June 6, 1897. After graduating from Navasota High School in 1914, she earned a bachelor of arts degree from Baylor University, where she contributed to the idea of establishing the Armstrong Browning Library.<>In the fall of 1924 she entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with John Norton, Charles Fabens Kelley, William Owen, and Helen Gardner. Gardner, the author of Art Through the Ages, inspired in her an interest in African and Asian art that shaped her career. In 1926 Blackshear was hired to teach art history under the direction of Gardner, and the two women thereafter formed a close relationship that lasted until Gardner's death in 1946. They have been credited with shaping the distinctive style that emerged among Chicago artists during the 1940s and the 1950s. Blackshear also emphasized visual analysis of the formal properties of art objects, an emphasis that one student described as "teaching art history as art, not as history."Blackshear rejected academicism in her art and teaching. Drawing on memories of her childhood on a Southern farm, she used blacks as her primary subject matter from 1924 to 1940. Influenced by African masks and textiles, Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat, and Cubism, she worked in a simplified, geometric style that became increasingly abstract in her later years. She experimented with ceramics, enamels, and batik processes after she earned her master of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute in 1940.She participated in over fifty-five group exhibitions sponsored by such organizations as the Art Students League of Chicago, the Chicago Society of Artists, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Kathleen Blackshear retired from teaching in 1961 and returned to Navasota with her companion, Ethel Spears.Her work as an artist and teacher was honored with the 1990 retrospective exhibition "A Tribute to Kathleen Blackshear," organized by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Southwestern University in Georgetown, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and a number of private collections in Navasota, Houston, Chicago, and San Diego. |
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