26 Facts About Shelby Shackelford

Shelby Shackelford was an American artist who worked mainly within the art communities of Baltimore, Maryland, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Shelby Shackelford was born in Houston, Virginia, a community that later changed its name to Halifax.

Shelby Shackelford's father having died before her first birthday, her mother brought her to Fredericksburg, Virginia where they lived with one of his cousins.

Shelby Shackelford passed most of her childhood in Fredericksburg and at Stuart Hall, a private boarding school for girls in Staunton, Virginia.

Shelby Shackelford disliked the school's conservatism and its "dull routine" but, nonetheless, won a scholarship there in 1920 and graduated in the spring of 1921.

At one point during her years at the Institute, Shelby Shackelford spent a summer in the art colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The Baltimore Sun printed a photo of Shelby Shackelford working on one of the two paintings she exhibited.

Shelby Shackelford showed paintings at an exhibition held by the Society of Independent Artists at New York's Waldorf Astoria in February 1925, including a self-portrait that a Baltimore critic believed to be daringly modern.

In what may have been her last exhibition in New York before the outbreak of World War II, Shelby Shackelford showed prints and drawings in the second biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1936.

Shelby Shackelford used a variety of media during her long career.

Shelby Shackelford made portraits and other figures, landscapes, still lifes, and mixed media.

Shelby Shackelford was seen from the first as an abstract artist and her work became more abstract as her career progressed but it was never purely abstract.

Shelby Shackelford described her use of a new medium that involved the use of crinkled paper pasted onto the ground of some of her paintings.

Shelby Shackelford took a leadership role in a few arts organizations and was a member of others.

Shelby Shackelford joined the Provincetown Art Association after she began spending her summers in that town.

Shelby Shackelford organized the Modernist Artists Association of Baltimore in 1925.

Shelby Shackelford was a founding member of the Women's Committee of the Baltimore Museum of Arts in 1952 and of the Jefferson Place Gallery in 1957.

Shelby Shackelford began her teaching career on her return to Baltimore during World War II.

Shelby Shackelford spent two years as a Red Cross volunteer teaching wounded soldiers at that city's US Marine Hospital.

In 1933, Shackelford illustrated a book by her husband: Time, Space, and Atoms by Richard T Cox.

The image at right, is one of the illustrations Shelby Shackelford made for this book.

Shelby Shackelford was born on September 27,1899, in a village called Houston, Virginia, a place that later changed its name to Halifax.

Shelby Shackelford did not remarry after the death of Jones Green and, as noted above, used some of her wealth to support Shackelford's boarding-school education during her high school years as well as her art education in Provincetown, Baltimore, and Paris.

Jones Green was a widower when he married Anna and Shelby Shackelford had a step-brother, Howard Green Shelby Shackelford, from the first marriage.

In 1926, Shelby Shackelford married Richard Threlkeld Cox, a physicist and amateur painter.

Shelby Shackelford died on August 20,1987, at the summer home she shared with Cox in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.