Ruth Pershing Uhler
American painter (1895–1967)
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Ruth Pershing Uhler (March 21, 1895 – March 28, 1967) was an American painter, teacher and curator. She was the first curator of education at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.[1]
Ruth Pershing Uhler | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 21, 1895 Gordon, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | March 28, 1967 (age 72) Houston, Texas, U.S. |
| Education | Painter, teacher, curator |
Early life and education
Uhler was born in Gordon, Pennsylvania, the daughter of William Shipman Uhler and Emma Lucetta Nattress Uhler.[2] She moved to Houston, Texas, with her family when she was in her teens. She attended the Moore Institute of Design in Philadelphia.[3][4]
Career
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]
Personal life and legacy
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]