Women Out West: Art on the Left Coast: Gene Kloss: Painter and Printmaker of the American West

Alice Geneva (Gene) Glasier Kloss was born in Oakland, California and attended the local public schools. Determined to have a career in art, Kloss studied at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1923, where she discovered the art of etching. Berkeley is where she perfected her skills as a painter under Ray Boynton and was first introduced to printmaking by the renowned etcher, Perham Wilhelm Nahl. After graduating in with honors 1924, she spent two years studying at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco and the College of Fine Arts in Oakland.

Her first major solo exhibition, which included almost 100 etchings, oils, watercolors, block prints and monotypes, at the Berkeley League of Fine Arts in March 1926 was so popular that it was extended for a month. This was the start of a career which included over 70 exhibitions in the Bay Area, where her watercolors were as popular with critics as her etchings.

Gene Glasier married Phillips Kloss, a writer and poet, in 1925 and on her honeymoon, she discovered the beauty of Taos, New Mexico after which she found her calling to document the landscape and the people. The couple made frequent trips to New Mexico where they eventually built an adobe home and divided their time between Berkeley and Taos. From the 1950s, with the exception of a five year stint in Cory, Colorado, until her death, Kloss was a year-round resident of New Mexico.

The West dominated Kloss's art. In her early work, she created views of the San Francisco Bay Area; Sierra Nevada; Mendocino Coast; Mojave Desert; Lake Tahoe; and the Monterey Peninsula. She also produced studies of the Arizona Desert; Yellowstone Lake; Canadian Rockies; and the Colorado Rockies, however, her most recurring themes focused on the Northern New Mexico landscape and the Native Americans there.

Gene Kloss

The Old Bridge

(Her first print)

ca 1924

4 & 1/2 x 3 & 1/2 inches

Etching

During the Depression from the years 1933 to 1944 Kloss was the sole etcher employed by the Public Works of Art Project. Her series of nine New Mexico scenes from that period were reproduced and distributed to public schools across the state. She also created watercolors and oil paintings for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1935, she was one of three Taos artists who represented New Mexico at a Paris exhibition called "Three Centuries of Art in the United States."

Gene Kloss became a National Academician in 1972, exhibiting her work from 1924 until nearly the time of her passing, winning countless awards. In addition to umpteen group events, she had a large number of one-person shows, including those at the Berkeley Art League (1926), Oakland Gallery (1932), Crocker Gallery, Sacramento (1939), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1945), Taos Art Association (1958), Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe (1960), Birger Sandzen Memorial Museum, Lindsborg, KS (1966), Muckenthaler Cultural Center, Fullerton, CA, (1980), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1988) and Harwood Gallery, University of New Mexico, Taos (1994).