Ruth Pershing Uhler

Uhler was a painter and a muralist as a young woman. She painted murals for the Houston Public Library, the Houston City Hall,^[5] and the YMCA building in the 1930s.^[4] But she is best known for her striking landscape paintings of the American Southwest, possibly inspired by the works of Georgia O'Keeffe.^[6] Uhler burned many of her own works in 1940, saying "I only want my best work to survive."^[1]

Uhler worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from 1937 to 1967, and in 1941 became the museum's first curator of education.^[1] She taught art classes at the museum,^[4][7] and was jokingly described as "curator of everything" for her attention to every detail of the museum's operations.^[8] "The great galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts were given hospitable warmth by her quiet, unobtrusive presence," noted a 1967 editorial in the Houston Post.^[9] She gave an oral history interview to the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art in 1965.^[3]

While she was recovering from tuberculosis in 1935 and 1936, Uhler lived with fellow artist Grace Spaulding John in Santa Fe.^[6] John painted a portrait of Uhler in 1932.^[10] Uhler died in 1967, from ovarian cancer, in Houston, at the age of 72. Only ten of her paintings are known to survive.^[11] In 1968, the Houston Post established the Ruth Pershing Uhler Memorial Scholarship Award in her memory.^[12] In 2017, six of her Earth Rhythms series of Southwestern landscapes were exhibited together at the Houston Public Library's Ideson Gallery.^[13] One of her Earth Rhythms paintings is at the Dallas Museum of Art.^[14] Another, "Growth" (1934), is in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas.^[15] There is a scrapbook about Uhler, including letters from her, in the Grace Spaulding John papers, on microfilm in the Archives of American Art.^[16]