13 Facts About Kathleen Blackshear

Kathleen Blackshear was an American Modernist artist known for her sensitive depictions of African-American subjects.

Kathleen Blackshear was born June 6,1897, near the Texas Cotton Belt in a city called Navasota, Texas.

Kathleen Blackshear spent much of her youth on cotton plantations owned by members of both her mother's and father's families near the town of Navasota.

Kathleen Blackshear left New York in 1918 and spent the next six years traveling around Texas, California, and Europe and taking odd jobs, including hand-coloring films and designing film posters in Los Angeles.

In 1924, Kathleen Blackshear took up her art studies again, this time at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with John Norton, Charles Fabens Kelley, William Owen, and art historian Helen Gardner who throughout her time at SAIC became a lifelong friend.

Kathleen Blackshear studied painting and graphic arts and later received her master's degree from SAIC in 1940.

In 1926, Kathleen Blackshear began teaching art history and studio courses at SAIC to help support herself and continued to do so until retiring in 1961.

Kathleen Blackshear was known for mentoring African-American artists, including Margaret Burroughs, and for introducing her students to African and Asian art through field trips to local collections.

Kathleen Blackshear supplied illustrations for Katharine Kuh's Art Has Many Faces.

Kathleen Blackshear's paintings are reminiscent of Regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton and modernists like Fernand Leger, while her whimsical abstract drawings evoke Paul Klee.

Kathleen Blackshear made two dioramas for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago.

Kathleen Blackshear had her first solo museum show in 1941 at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, TX.

Kathleen Blackshear's work is in the collections of the Modern Art Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other institutions.