Kathleen Blackshear (1897–1988) was an American Modernist artist known for her sensitive depictions of African-American subjects.

Early Life and Education

Kathleen Blackshear was born June 6, 1897, near the Texas Cotton Belt in a city called

Navasota Navasota is a city in Grimes County, Texas, Grimes County, Texas, United States. The population was 7,643 at the 2020 census. In 2005, the Texas Legislature designated Navasota as the "Blues Capital of Texas" in honor of the late Mance Lipscomb, ...

, Texas. She was the only child of Edward Duncan Blackshear and May (Terrell) Blackshear. She spent much of her youth on cotton plantations owned by members of both her mother's and father's families near the town of

. Her childhood friendships with the children of African-American field workers strongly influenced her later career. Blackshear graduated from Navasota High School in 1914 and showed an aptitude for art at an early age. After graduating high school, she attended Baylor University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in modern languages in 1917, after which she went to New York to study at the Art Students League. Her teachers at the ASL included Solon Borglum, George Bridgman, and Frank Vincent DuMond. She left New York in 1918 and spent the next six years traveling around Texas, California, and Europe and taking odd jobs, including hand-coloring films and designing film posters in Los Angeles. In 1924, Blackshear took up her art studies again, this time at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she studied with John Norton, Charles Fabens Kelley, William Owen, and art historian Helen Gardner who throughout her time at SAIC became a lifelong friend. She studied painting and graphic arts and later received her master's degree from SAIC in 1940.

Teaching and illustration work

In 1926, Blackshear began teaching art history and studio courses at SAIC to help support herself and continued to do so until retiring in 1961. She was known for mentoring African-American artists, including Margaret Burroughs, and for introducing her students to African and Asian art through field trips to local collections. While at SAIC, Blackshear supplied the analytical drawings for two of Helen Gardner's books, ''

Art Through the Ages ''Gardner's Art Through the Ages'' is an American textbook on the history of art, with the 2004 edition by Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Mamiya. The 2001 edition was awarded both a McGuffey award for longevity and the "Texty" Award for curre ...

'' (1926)—one of the earliest American art history textbooks to incorporate non-Western art—and ''Understanding the Arts'' (1932). She also supplied illustrations for Katharine Kuh's ''Art Has Many Faces'' (1951). Through their shared interest in non-Western art, Blackshear and Gardner have been credited with being key influences on the distinctive style of postwar Chicago artists.

Art career

Influenced by various strains of Modernism including Post-Impressionism and

Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...

, Blackshear developed a range of styles with bold, simplified forms and rhythmic or patterned elements often featuring strong diagonals and tilted planes. Her paintings are reminiscent of Regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton and modernists like

Fernand Léger Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (; February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painting, painter, sculpture, sculptor, and film director, filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism (known as "tubism") which he gradually ...

, while her whimsical abstract drawings evoke Paul Klee. During the height of her career, between 1924 and 1940, African Americans were the central subjects of her work, and she became known for depicting them with warmth and clarity but without sentimentality. In 1939, critic

C. J. Bulliet Clarence Joseph Bulliet (March 16, 1883 – October 20, 1952) was an American art critic and author. Bulliet grew up in Corydon, Indiana and graduated in 1904 from Indiana University Bloomington. For nine years he pursued a journalism car ...

called her "Chicago’s most sympathetic, most understanding painter of the American Negro." Blackshear also made two

diorama A diorama is a replica of a scene, typically a three-dimensional full-size or miniature model, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase for a museum. Dioramas are often built by hobbyists as part of related hobbies such as military vehicle mode ...

s for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. During her lifetime, Blackshear exhibited her work at regional museums such as the

Dallas Museum of Fine Arts The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is an art museum located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, along Woodall Rodgers Freeway between St. Paul and Harwood. In the 1970s, the museum moved from its previous location in Fair Park to the Art ...

, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Delgado Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA). She had her first solo museum show in 1941 at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, TX.

Personal life

Although she lived in Chicago, Blackshear kept a studio in Houston and often spent the summer in Navasota. Blackshear's life companion was the artist Ethel Spears, whom she probably met at SAIC and who died in 1974. Blackshear died October 14, 1988, in Navasota.

Legacy

Blackshear's work is in the collections of the Modern Art Museum (Fort Worth, TX), the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other institutions. Blackshear was the subject of a 1990 retrospective at SAIC entitled "A Tribute to Kathleen Blackshear." Her papers and those of Ethel Spears are held by the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.

References

External links

Kathleen Blackshear and Ethel Spears Papers, 1920–1990
(finding aid) {{DEFAULTSORT:Blackshear, Kathleen 1897 births 1988 deaths 20th-century American women artists American women painters Painters from Texas Baylor University alumni School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni 20th-century American painters People from Navasota, Texas 20th-century American women painters