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| Kathleen Blackshear Unknown Photographer |
Kathleen Blackshear was born in the Texas cotton belt. She grew up spending summers on the nearby cotton plantations of both her maternal and paternal families close to Navasota, a town founded by her grandfather. It was there that she became friends with the children of the African Americans who picked cotton for her family-an experience that would have great significance in her later career, both as an artist and teacher. She began to study art at age 12. The first woman in her town to wear trousers, Blackshear bucked convention her whole life. She earned a bachelor’s degree in modern languages from Baylor University in Waco in 1917 and studied at the Art Students League in New York, where her teachers included Solon Borglum, George Bridgeman, and Frank Vincent DuMond. In 1918, she left New York and spent the next six years travelling and exploring career options in Los Angeles, where she got a job creating posters for films. She also found work in Culver City coloring films in the days before Technicolor, and when every transparency had to be hand-colored under a magnifying glass. Blackshear also explored New Orleans, Europe, and Mexico, continuing to produce photographs, prints, paintings, and sculpture.
Blackshear moved to Chicago in 1924, where she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) to study painting and graphic arts. She was inspired by the art history class taught by Helen Gardner in which she enrolled in 1925. Gardner became mentor and inspiration to Blackshear, and they formed a close relationship which lasted until Gardner's death in 1946. Blackshear began teaching art history in 1926, continuing until her retirement in 1961. Like Gardner—whose widely used textbooks, Art Through the Ages (1926) and Understanding the Arts (1932) which she illustrated—Blackshear introduced modernist ideas in her courses. She did not teach the standard history of classical through Renaissance art, but included a wide variety of non-western, pre-Renaissance, and progressive, twentieth-century art in her classes as well. She sent students to explore not just the galleries of the Art Institute, but the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, the Oriental Institute, and the Bronx Zoo for inspiration. In this way, Blackshear influenced generations of students at SAIC to discover idiosyncratic sources and connections with cultures other than their own, laying the groundwork for later Chicago artists of the Monster Roster and Imagist movement. Blackshear was particularly influential in inspiring and supporting the careers of the African American students in her classes, such as Margaret Burroughs. She also made two dioramas for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, and illustrated Art Has Many Faces by Katherine Kuh. Blackshear emphasized the aesthetic over the historical in teaching art history.
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| Kathleen Blackshear Untitled (Woman Mopping) ca 1930s Lithograph |
Blackshear frequently depicted African Americans, inspired by her summer visits to Texas and her childhood memories but also by her experiences in Chicago. Her lithograph,Untitled (Woman mopping) sympathetically depicts a sturdy washerwoman mopping, in a generalized style typical of the American Scene and regionalist styles of the Depression era. Blackshear renders her head at an unnatural angle as if to emphasize the backbreaking work, and her heavy, bulky form suggests that she has and will continue to spend hours performing this monotonous task. It exemplifies why critic C. J. Bulliet called her “Chicago’s most sympathetic, most understanding painter of the American Negro” in 1939. Bulliet continued: “Her Negroes in these slight but expert drawings live and breathe a happy, wholesome life,” though he was quick to qualify that she was not a Communist recruiter.
From 1924 to 1940, Blackshear returned to Navasota to visit her mother at Christmas as during these visits, she often depicted the small-town Texas ritual of Saturday shopping. Her familiarity with her subjects enhanced her sensitivity and understanding of a "simpler world where eloquent compassion was adequate for commenting on racial issues and clean form was remarkably effective in communicating art values."
A Boy Named Alligator demonstrates her interest in storytelling found in much Regionalism of the time and the painting's interest lies not in the narrative, but in its bold, simplified forms and rhythmic patterns of the land.
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| Kathleen Blackshear A Boy named Alligator ca 1930 22 1/8 x 18 1/8 inches |
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| Kathleen Blackshear Ruby Lee and Loula May Washington ca 1932 Oil on canvas |
In her best works, Blackshear captures her subjects with simple grace and humanity without sentimentality or cliche. In her painting, Ruby Lee and Lula May Washington, she paints a dual portrait where the wood grain provides and intriguing visual backdrop.
Blackshear maintained a studio in Houston and spent many summers at her home in Navasota, After her retirement in 1961, Kathleen Blackshear returned to Navasota with her companion, Ethel Spears, and continued to lecture on art at museums and schools throughout Texas until the early 1970s. She received the title Professor Emeritus from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1968. She died on October 14, 1988 in Navasota where she is buried in Oakland Cemetery.
Blackshear’s work was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Society or Artists; Witte Memorial Museum, San Antonio, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas; among others. Her works also are held in the Art Institute of Chicago.
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| Kathleen Blackshear Title Unknown ca 1930s Oil on canvas |
Sources______________________________________________________________________
- Bulliet, C. J. “Artists of Chicago Past and Present: No. 97: Kathleen Blackshear.” Chicago Daily News, July 29, 1939.
- Illinois Women Artists Project, http://iwa.bradley.edu/?q=artists/KathleenBlackshear.
- Kovinick, Phil, and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick. An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.
- Landauer, Susan, and Becky Reese. “Lone Star Spirits.” In Patricia Trenton, ed. Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890–1945, 199–200. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.
- Tormollan, Carole. A Tribute to Kathleen Blackshear. Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1990.
- Tormollan, Carole. “Kathleen Blackshear.” In Women Building Chicago: 1790-1990, edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, 84–86. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
- Weininger, Susan. “Kathleen Blackshear.” In Elizabeth Kennedy, ed. Chicago Modern, 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, 92. Exh. cat. Chicago: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2004.
- Yochim, Louise Dunn. Role and Impact: The Chicago Society of Artists, 222. Chicago: Chicago Society of Artists, 1979.
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