14 Facts About Ethel Spears

Ethel Spears was an American artist known for her humorous paintings of Depression-era urban life.

Ethel Spears was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 5,1903, and grew up in the Beverly area.

Around 1925, Spears graduated from SAIC and decided to move to Woodstock, New York to study with the sculptor Alexander Archipenko.

Ethel Spears took classes at the Art Students League and New York University and supported herself with odd jobs.

Ethel 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.

Ethel Spears's style has been compared to that of Peggy Bacon, though Spears's caricatures are less harsh.

Ethel Spears worked mostly in watercolor, but in oil and gouache.

Ethel 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.

Ethel Spears 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.

Ethel Spears was a member of the National Society of Mural Painters.

In 1937, Ethel Spears was hired as an art teacher at SAIC, and she continued to teach classes there for 24 years.

Ethel Spears taught a range of subjects, including design, painting, and ceramics.

Ethel Spears established SAIC's departments of enamelling and silkscreen printing and taught those courses as well.

The Flagg-Rochelle Public Library contains a mural, Merry Go Round by Ethel Spears, painted and installed in 1938.