Olive Rush

1873 Fairmount, Indiana - 1966 Santa Fe, New Mexico

BiographyA painter and illustrator, Olive Rush is best known for her mural paintings.

Rush was born on a farm near Fairmount, Indiana and attended a Society of Friends school founded by her parents. At age seventeen, she enrolled at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana but left the next year to study at the Corcoran School of Art. The youngest person in her class, Rush won a prize after her first year for the student showing the most progress.

In 1894, Rush moved to New York where she studied at the Art Students League while working as a staff artist for the New York Tribune. In 1898 she received her first book commission. The next year, Rush moved to Philadelphia, continuing her career in commercial art and pursuing easel painting in her spare time. She became especially known for her illustrations of women and children in magazines such as St. Nicholas and Women's Home Companion.

In 1904, the teacher and illustrator, Howard Pyle, invited Rush to become a student in his private school in Wilmington, Delaware. Over the next six years she studied in Pyle's "Art Colony," assisted him in at least one mural project and executed her own commissions including murals at St. Andrew Episcopal Church in Wilmington.

By 1918, Rush had tired of New York and returned to Indiana to be near family. She rented a studio in Indianapolis where she focused more on easel painting, executing portrait commissions-particularly portraits of children-and painting murals for the public schools.

Rush had first visited Santa Fe in 1914 on a trip through the Southwest with her father and brother. She was granted an exhibit of her paintings at the Museum of New Mexico's Palace of the Governors, the first woman to gain that honor. In 1920, she relocated to Santa Fe where she spent the rest of her long life.

Native figures, artifacts, and genre became the subject of much of her work. In 1929 she was hired to paint frescoes of Indian figures in the newly expanded La Fonda hotel on the Santa Fe Plaza. Their popularity led to an invitation to oversee a mural project at the Santa Fe Indian School, painted by students. This experience, in turn, led to Rush's long-time involvement in promoting Native arts and artists. During the WPA years, Rush painted murals in buildings in New Mexico, Colorado, and Oklahoma.

In addition to portraits and Native genre, Rush frequently painted landscape and animal subjects. Her best-known work is delicately stylized, drawn with a very light hand, rendered in pastel colors.

Person TypeIndividual

Terms