Olive Rush Olive

paikka: Fairmount

Syntynyt: 1873

kuolema: 1966

Elämäkerta:

Olive Rush was a painter, illustrator, muralist, and an important pioneer in Native American art education. Born on June 10, 1873, near Fairmount, Indiana, she passed away on August 20, 1966, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her paintings are held in a number of private collections and museums, including: the Brooklyn Museum of New York City, the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Early Life and Education

Rush was the fourth of Nixon and Louisa Rush's six children. The Rush family lived on a farm in Grant County, Indiana, where they were members of the local Society of Friends. Olive kept diaries at the age of 13 in 1886, writing about her life, school lessons, and going sledding in Indiana winters. She studied at Earlham College, the art school associated with the Corcoran Gallery of Art and at the Art Students League before becoming an illustrator in New York.

Career

In 1914, Rush visited New Mexico and Arizona with her father, and she had a one-person exhibition at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. She made several visits to New Mexico over the next couple of years and moved permanently to Santa Fe in 1920. Despite the relative isolation of Santa Fe, Rush continued to contribute to national and international shows over the next thirty years, which activity culminated in a retrospective at the Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery in 1957. Some of her notable works include Osage Treaties, a mural painted for the post office in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and The Library Reaches the People, a fresco at the public library in Santa Fe. Her murals were produced from 1934 to 1943 in the United States through the Section of Painting and Sculpture, later called the Section of Fine Arts, of the Treasury Department.

• Murals were intended to boost the morale of the American people from the effects of the Depression by depicting uplifting subjects.
• Almost 850 artists were commissioned to paint 1371 murals, most of which were installed in post offices, libraries, and other public buildings.
• 162 of the artists were women, including Olive Rush, who was one of the few female artists to receive a commission from the Section of Fine Arts.

For more information about Olive Rush's life and work, visit Brooklyn Museum or check out her page on Haan Mansion Museum. You can also explore the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum to see more of her paintings.