Ethel Spears (1903–1974) was an American artist known for her humorous paintings of Depression-era urban life.

Education

Ethel Spears was born in

Chicago, Illinois Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

, on October 5, 1903, and grew up in the Beverly area. After high school, she entered the

School of the Art Institute of Chicago The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a Private university, private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which gr ...

(SAIC), where she studied textiles and earned a certificate after completing a three-year program. Having already lost interest in textiles, she immediately re-enrolled in SAIC to study fine arts. Spears chose to study under the most avant-garde member of the faculty, muralist John W. Norton. With his mentorship, she won the opportunity to paint two murals in the SAIC tearoom. Around 1925, Spears graduated from SAIC and decided to move to

Woodstock, New York Woodstock is a Administrative divisions of New York#Town, town in Ulster County, New York, United States, in the northern part of the county, northwest of Kingston, New York, Kingston. It lies within the borders of the Catskill Park. The popula ...

to study with the sculptor

Alexander Archipenko Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko (February 25, 1964) was a Ukrainian-American avant-garde artist, sculpture, sculptor, and graphic designer, graphic artist, active in France and the United States. He was one of the first to apply the principles o ...

. Nine months later she moved to New York City, where she stayed for some five years. She took classes at the

Art Students League The Art Students League of New York is an art school in the American Fine Arts Society in Manhattan, New York City. The Arts Students League is known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists. Although artists may study f ...

and New York University and supported herself with odd jobs. Around 1929–30, she spent time in Paris, France, afterwards moving back to Chicago. Enrolling once more at SAIC, she earned her master's degree.

Art and teaching

Spears became known for her cartoonish, droll watercolors of daily life in Chicago and New York: in streets and parks, on playgrounds and beaches, and inside schools and apartments. She also painted a few rural landscapes. Like some of Ilonka Karasz's ''New Yorker'' covers, the outdoor scenes often show a bird's eye view of people all going their separate ways. The critic C. J. Bulliet wrote that her canvases "are alive with tiny figures" who are "doing humorous things without knowing it." A master of composition, Spears packs her images with vivid and telling details. Her style has been compared to that of

Peggy Bacon Margaret Frances Bacon (May 2, 1895 – January 4, 1987) was an American artist, best known for her satirical caricatures. Bacon studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League of New York, where she taught herself drypoint an ...

, though Spears's caricatures are less harsh. Spears worked mostly in watercolor, but also in oil and gouache. Spears exhibited regularly throughout her life, mostly in Chicago and New York, at galleries and museums such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Corcoran Gallery. She was very active as a muralist, completing more than two dozen murals in the Chicago area alone, many of them through the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; from 1935 to 1939, then known as the Work Projects Administration from 1939 to 1943) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to car ...

. These included murals at the University of Illinois and at public buildings like schools and post offices; for example, she painted a mural of the Swedish botanist

Carl Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné,#Blunt, Blunt (2004), p. 171. was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming o ...

at a school named for him. She was a member of the

National Society of Mural Painters The National Society of Mural Painters (NSMP) is an American artists' organization originally known as The Mural Painters. The charter of the society is to advance the techniques and standards for the design and execution of mural art for the e ...

. In 1937, Spears was hired as an art teacher at SAIC, and she continued to teach classes there for 24 years. She taught a range of subjects, including design, painting, and ceramics. She established SAIC's departments of enamelling and silkscreen printing and taught those courses as well.

Murals

The Flagg-Rochelle Public Library contains a mural, ''Merry Go Round'' by Ethel Spears, painted and installed in 1938. Murals were produced from 1934 to 1943 in the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

through the

Section of Painting and Sculpture Section, Sectioning, or Sectioned may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * Section (music), a complete, but not independent, musical idea * Section (typography), a subdivision, especially of a chapter, in books and documents ** Section s ...

, later called the

Section of Fine Arts Section, Sectioning, or Sectioned may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * Section (music), a complete, but not independent, musical idea * Section (typography), a subdivision, especially of a chapter, in books and documents ** Section sig ...

, of the Treasury Department. The WPA was the largest and most ambitious American

New Deal agency The alphabet agencies, or New Deal agencies, were the U.S. federal government agencies created as part of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The earliest agencies were created to combat the Great Depression in the United States a ...

, employing individuals to carry out

public works Public works are a broad category of infrastructure projects, financed and procured by a government body for recreational, employment, and health and safety uses in the greater community. They include public buildings ( municipal buildings, ...

projects. In 2019 several of Spears' WPA murals were removed from Chicago area middle schools because of concern that the subjects depicted are primarily white and do not match the diversity of the student body today. By the late 1950s, Spears was suffering from an illness that may have been lead poisoning from her work with enamelling. With her life partner and fellow SAIC teacher Kathleen Blackshear, she retired to Blackshear's home town of

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

, Texas. Spears died August 2, 1974, in Navasota. Her papers and those of Blackshear 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)
Ethel Spears Catalog (1903–1974) paintings from the 1920s and 1930s
{{DEFAULTSORT:Spears, Ethel 1903 births 1974 deaths 20th-century American painters American watercolorists Painters from Chicago School of the Art Institute of Chicago faculty School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni American women watercolorists People from Navasota, Texas 20th-century American women painters 20th-century American women academics