Featured Exhibition

THE FEMININE HAND: PAINTINGS BY 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY WOMEN ARTISTS
March 9 – May 8, 2013

Lillian Genth - Lady on Park Path

Josephine Miles Lewis - Portrait of Girl

This special exhibition includes paintings by twenty women artists, each of whom achieved considerable artistic success in a time when success very difficult for a woman. Most were born in the mid- to late 1800s, when only a few art schools accepted women and when it was assumed that paintings by women would be as frail and delicate as women's minds and bodies were supposed to be. Only remarkable women, with energy, patience, fortitude, and an adventurous spirit, as well as talent, were rewarded with a "place on the line" at the Salon in Paris or the Armory Show in New York.

Alice Schille - Yellow Building and People in the Street

Anna Thorne - Clam Fishing New Orleans 1954

These extraordinary watercolors, oils, and acrylics were selected from the collections of a gentleman who resides near Columbus. One or more paintings were chosen by the following artists: Greta Allen, Theresa Ferber Bernstein, Anna Richards Brewster, Ethel M. Cooke, Fern Kuns Coppedge, Mabel Mason DeBra, Lillian Mathilde Genth, Anna Althea Hills, Harriet Rhoades Kirkpatrick, Josephine Klippart, Josephine Miles Lewis, Barbara Meikle, Jane Peterson, Alice Schille, Dixie Selden, Harriet Sundström, Anna Louise Thorne, Bessie Wall, Mabel May Woodward, and Marguerite Thompson Zorach. Of the twenty, Cooke, DeBra, Hills, Kirkpatrick, Klippart, Selden, Schille, and Thorne were born in Ohio.

With the exception of one or two, they learned their art from the best schools in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Paris. Almost a majority studied with William Merritt Chase in New York or at his summer school at Schinnecock, Long Island. Most went on to travel in France and far beyond; their paintings offer glimpses of exotic places and peoples. Like Alice Schille, Jane Peterson, and Lillian Genth, most of these artists took up a personal, coloristic, and light filled impressionist style. Some, whose work is also included in the exhibition, kept their native landscape close at hand, carefully offering the virtues of the agrarian Midwest. Still others were in the forefront of modernism, painting and socializing with the European and American avant-garde elite. The exhibition quite literally throws an even light on each.

A small catalog with biographies for the artists is available for this exhibition.