Early Days: Before The War
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago was founded in 1879, from the remains of an earlier school founded in 1866 (thus the school predates the museum of the same name). Early students and faculty were conservative and derivative in their tastes, imitating popular European models. Arthur B. Davies, a former SAIC student and one of "the Eight" was considered a disappointment for being a member of a radical group of urban modernists. In 1913, SAIC students held a protest with costumes and bonfires against the Chicago showing of the Armory Show, a collection of the best new modern art; the newspapers described the students' activity as a riot.
Only a year later the African-American realist Archibald J. Motley, graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; he kept his modern, jazz-influenced paintings secret for some years after.
For many years the Art Institute of Chicago regularly held annual exhibits of local artists, but these ended decades ago. Mary Agnes Yerkes, (1886–1989), was an American Impressionist painter and one such exhibitor at AIC from 1912-1915. Born in Oak Park, she studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where she also taught, and the at the currently named School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is noted for her plein-air painting while camping the American West and its National Parks.
Read more about this topic: Visual Arts Of Chicago
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or war:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“... it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one’s own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)