Elsie Mari Bates Freund (1912–2001) was an American studio art jeweler, watercolorist, and textile artist. She and her husband, Louis Freund, established an art school in Eureka Springs in 1941. Elsie Bates was born on January 12, 1912, in

Mincy, Missouri Mincy is an unincorporated community in south-central Taney County, in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, United States. Mincy is located approximately four miles north of the Missouri-Arkansas Arkansas ( ) is a landlocked state in the W ...

. She studied at the

Kansas City Art Institute The Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) is a private art school in Kansas City, Missouri. The college was founded in 1885 and is an accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and Higher Learning Commission. The institute ...

. Bates married fellow artist H. Louis Freund in 1939. The couple established the summer ''Art School of the Ozarks'', which they operated from 1940 to 1951. Her husband taught painting and drawing while she taught classes related to crafts, such as weaving and design. The Freund school operated only during summers, Elsie was able to study more, taking her first ceramics class at the Wichita Art Association in Kansas. This is where she began to develop a jewelry-making process that combined clay, glass, and later—at the suggestion of a Florida shop owner—silver. Louis named the works “Elsaramics,” but Elsie shortened this to “Elsa,” which she stamped on her jewelry. In 1995, Freund moved to Parkway Village, a retirement community in Little Rock. She died on June 14, 2001, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Freund's work is in the

Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. The museum is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park (Chicago), Grant Park. Its collection, stewa ...

, the

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heig ...

, the

Cleveland Museum of Art The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Located in the Wade Park District of University Circle, the museum is internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian art, Asian and Art of anc ...

, the Cooper Hewitt, the

Corning Museum of Glass The Corning Museum of Glass is a museum in Corning (city), New York, Corning, New York, United States, dedicated to the art, history, and science of glass. It was founded in 1951 by Corning Incorporated, Corning Glass Works and currently has a ...

, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...

, the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

, and the

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen ...

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