Florence Ellen Ware (1891 – 1972) was an American artist from

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

. She was a painter and a professor of art at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (the U, U of U, or simply Utah) is a public university, public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. It was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret (Book of Mormon), Deseret by the General A ...

for 25 years. She is well known for her murals, sponsored by the WPA and painted in the university's

Kingsbury Hall Kingsbury Hall is a center for the performing arts located on the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City, Utah. History Kingsbury Hall was designed by Edward O. Anderson and Lorenzo Snow Young and built in 1930. It was named after Josep ...

in 1936.

Life and work

Ware was born in

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. It is the county seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in the state. The city is the core of the Salt Lake Ci ...

, Utah. Her father was architect Walter E. Ware and her mother was Jennie M. Hartley. Her early life included an education in varied arts. She attended the

, and graduated first in her class at 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 ...

,. Ware began teaching at the University of Utah in 1918. She was the first President of the Association of Utah Artists in 1940. Ware died in Salt Lake City in 1972. Ware went on an 18-month tour of Europe and the Near East in 1928 where she completed several small paintings that fit into her box of oil paints. Her instructors included J.T. Harwood, Edwin Evans, Charles Hawthorne, and Anna Hills. Ware designed the house murals, which depict "drama through the ages," of the Capitol Theatre in

, circa 1936, as part of a

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 ...

project.

References

1891 births 1972 deaths University of Utah faculty Artists from Salt Lake City 20th-century American painters University of Utah alumni 20th-century American women painters 20th-century American people 20th-century American women academics {{Utah-bio-stub