Olive was a Friend (Quaker)

Olive Rush is Notable.

Research Notes

Olive Rush was born June 10, 1873, and attended the Fairmount Academy and Earlham College. She early displayed marked artistic talent and began her studies along this line at Earlham College. Subsequently, she spent two years in the Corcoran Art School, connected with the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D. C, and was there awarded second prize in a class of eighty pupils for advancement. Later she became a student in the Art Student's League, New York City, and became a well-known illustrator for writers and authors, making first-page frontispieces for such well-known magazines as Scribner's, Harper's, the Ladies' Home Journal, and the Woman's Home Companion. She conceived and provided studies for large cathedrals and churches, principally windows, and painted portraits of well-known people throughout the country. With Ethel Brown, she occupied the studio at Wilmington, Delaware, left vacant by the death of Howard Pyle, at the request of his widow. Her pictures, largely subject pieces, have been exhibited at various art expositions and salons, and at this time she is successfully continuing her work near Paris, France.^[1]

She lived at her farmhouse and studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico from 1920 until her death in 1966. In her will, she left her Santa Fe studio to the Society of Friends to use as a meetinghouse. ^[2]

Biography

The following is directly quoted from the Biographical Notes accompanying the Olive Rush papers in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art ^[3]

"Olive Rush was born in Fairmount, Indiana in 1875 to a Quaker farm family of six children, and attended nearby Earlham College, a Quaker school with a studio art program. Encouraged by her teacher, Rush enrolled in the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1890, where she stayed for two years and achieved early recognition for her work. In 1893, Rush joined the Indiana delegation of artists to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In 1894, she moved to New York City and continued her studies at the Art Students League with Henry Siddons Mowbray, John Twachtman, and Augustus St. Gaudens. She secured her first job as an illustrator with Harper and Brothers and quickly started doing additional illustration work for Good Housekeeping, Scribner's, The Delineator, Woman's Home Companion, Sunday Magazine, and St. Nicholas Magazine. Rush also became a staff artist at the New York Tribune and illustrated several books.

In 1904, Rush sent an inquiry with samples of her work to master illustrator Howard Pyle, who had established what was then the only school of illustration in the country in Wilmington, Delaware. There he provided free instruction to a small number hand-picked artists culled from hundreds of applicants. Although Pyle did not admit women to his studio, he encouraged her to come and join the class for lectures and criticisms. Rush moved to Delaware later that year, joining a growing number of female illustrators there including Ethel Pennewill Brown (later Leach), Blanche Chloe Grant, Sarah Katherine Smith, and Harriet Roosevelt Richards, among others. Rush and her female colleagues lived together in a boarding house known as Tusculum, which became well-known as a gathering place for women artists.

Rush traveled to Europe in 1910, embarking on a period of intense study and travel which would mark a steady transition from illustration to painting. She studied at Newlyn in Cornwall, England and then in France with the American impressionist Richard E. Miller. She returned to Wilmington in 1911, where she moved into Pyle's studio with Ethel Pennewill Brown. Rush bounced to New York, Boston, and back to France, where she lived for a time with fellow artists Alice Schille, Ethel Pennewill Brown, and Orville Houghton Peets. Her reputation grew, and she began to exhibit regularly in major national and regional juried exhibitions including the Carnegie, Pennsylvania Academy, and Corcoran annual exhibitions, as well as the Hoosier Salon.

In 1914, Rush made her first trip to Arizona and New Mexico. Passing through Santa Fe on her return trip, Rush made contact with the artists community at the Museum of New Mexico, where she secured an impromptu solo exhibition after showing her new work, inspired by the landscape of the Southwest. She made Santa Fe her permanent home in 1920 in an adobe cottage on Canyon Road, which became a main thoroughfare of the Santa Fe artists' community.

Rush began to experiment with fresco painting, and developed her own techniques suitable to the local climate. She became a sought-after muralist and was asked to create frescoes for many private homes and businesses. In her painting, she often depicted the Native American dances and ceremonies she attended. She exhibited these paintings around the country, including with the Society of Independent Artists in New York, and in the Corcoran Annual Juried exhibition, where Mrs. Herbert Hoover and Duncan Phillips both purchased her work.

In 1932, Rush was hired to teach at the Santa Fe Indian School. Rush's enthusiastic work in the 1930s with the young pueblo artists is credited with helping to bring about a flourishing of Native American visual art in New Mexico. Rush continued to work with native artists throughout her life, and many of her associates went on to gain national reputations, including Harrison Begay, Awa-Tsireh, Pop Chalee, Pablita Valerde, and Ha-So-De (Narciso Abeyta).

From 1934 to 1939, Rush executed murals for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Rush's federal art projects included murals for the Santa Fe Public Library (1934), the Biology Building of the New Mexico Agricultural College (1935), the Pawhuska, Oklahoma Post Office (1938), and the Florence, Colorado Post Office (1939). Rush was also asked to join the Advisory Committee on Indian Art created by the PWAP in 1934, to help administer a segment of the program aimed at employing Native American artists.

In her later years, Rush's artwork became increasingly experimental, incorporating the ideas of Chinese painting, Native American art, and her contemporaries, the modernists, especially Wassily Kandinsky. She continued painting and exhibiting until 1964, when illness prohibited her from working. She died in 1966, leaving her home and studio to the Santa Fe Society of Friends.

Sources consulted for this biography include Olive Rush: A Hoosier Artist in New Mexico (1992) by Stanley L. Cuba, and Almost Forgotten: Delaware Women Artists and Arts Patrons 1900-1950 (2002) by Janice Haynes Gilmore."

Sources

1. ↑ Blackford and Grant Counties, Indiana, A Chronicle of their People Past and Present With Family Lineage and Personal Memoirs, Compiled Under the Editorial Supervision of BENJAMIN G. SHINN, VOLUME II, ILLUSTRATED, THE LEWIS PUBLlSHlNG COMPANY, Chicago and New York 1914 page 533
2. ↑ David Giltrow, History of the "Olive Rush Studio", Santa Fe Monthly Meeting.
3. ↑ McShea, Megan, 2005, A Finding Aid to the Olive Rush Papers, 1879-1967, in the Archives of American Art.

See Also:

• Olive Rush (1873-1966) on Find A Grave: Memorial #90830856 at Park Cemetery, Fairmount, Grant County, Indiana, USA; retrieved 26 November 2018
• "Genealogy of the Rush Family" author unknown
• Olive Rush Wikipedia page
• McShea, Megan, 2005, A Finding Aid to the Olive Rush Papers, 1879-1967, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
• Gussie Fauntleroy, "Perspective: The Gentle Rebel: Olive Rush", Western Art & Architecture, April/May 2018.

• "United States Social Security Death Index," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:JGMW-33F : 19 May 2014), Olive Rush, Aug 1966; citing U.S. Social Security Administration, Death Master File, database (Alexandria, Virginia: National Technical Information Service, ongoing).