Grace Clements (artist)

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Grace Clements
Born June 8, 1905[1]
Oakland, California[1]
Died January 10, 1969[2][3]
Los Angeles, California[4]
Spouse

Thayer Waldo (married 1938)[4]

Robert DeLuce (spouse at time of death)[4][2]
Nationality American

Grace Richardson Clements (1905–1969[3]) was an American painter, mosaicist, and art writer. She was active as an artist in the 1930s and early 1940s.[5]

Clements was born in Oakland, California on June 8, 1905.[1] She studied art under Kenneth Hayes Miller and Boardman Robinson in New York City from 1925 to 1930.[1][3] She moved to Los Angeles in 1930, settling in the neighborhood of Edendale.[6] She taught art at the Chouinard Art Institute and Pasadena's Stickney Memorial School of Art.[3] She had a 1931 solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in which 21 of her paintings were presented.[3] In 1935, she became involved with a group of artists in Los Angeles known as the Post-Surrealists; other artists in the group included Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg.[7][6][1] With this group, she presented her artwork in a "landmark" exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art in December 1935, and then at the Brooklyn Museum the next summer.[1][3] In addition, she was the first of the group to lay out its theoretical underpinnings, which she did in the March 1936 article "New Content -- New Form" in the journal Art Front, published by the American Artists' Congress.[3][8][1] She was passionate about social justice and "adopted the theme of social engagement within an essentially Modernist vocabulary".[9] She worked for the Works Progress Administration. Her works include the 1942 murals and ceramic tiles in the Long Beach Airport, collectively titled Communication (Aviation and Navigation);[3][10] The History of Aviation, a Federal Art Project fresco painted with Jean Goodwin Ames at Charles A. Lindbergh Middle School in Long Beach;[11] a mosaic at the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium (then the largest cut-tile mosaic in the United States);[6] and Reconsideration of Time and Space.

Clements married journalist Thayer Waldo in 1938, and the couple moved to the Bay Area in the late 1940s.[12][13][4][1] In the 1940s, Clements stopped working at a painter, and instead worked as an art critic.[8] She contributed to Arts and Architecture and Art Front magazines, and also did radio commentary including a weekly program on the Bay Area radio station KPFA.[14][6][13] Later in her life, Clements married astrologer Robert DeLuce and became involved in astrology herself.[4][1][15][8] Clements died on January 10, 1969 in Los Angeles.[2][3][4] Her works are held by Mills College,[16] the Oakland Museum,[16] and the Wolfsonian-FIU.[17]

Exhibitions

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 Ehrlich, Susan; Paul Karlstrom (1990). Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956. Santa Barbara Museum of Art. pp. 53–54. ISBN 9780899510767. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 http://www.californiaartauction.com/clements-grace
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 Ehrlich, Susan, ed. (1994). Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957. Hammer Museum. pp. 94–95. ISBN 0943739187. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Fort, Ilene Susan; Teresa Arcq; Terri Geis (2012). In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. Prestel Publishing. ISBN 3791351419. 
  5. ↑ Nancy Dustin Wall Moure (1980). Painting and Sculpture in Los Angeles, 1900-1945. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-87587-098-4. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Hurewitz, Daniel (2007). Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics. University of California Press. pp. 98–100. ISBN 978-0-520-94169-4. 
  7. ↑ Smith, Richard Cándida (1996). Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California. University of California Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-520-20699-1. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Fort, Ilene Susan. "The Adventuresome, the Eccentrics, and the Dreamers: Women Modernists of Southern California". In Patricia Trenton, ed. (1995). Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945. University of California Press. pp. 94, 98, 101. ISBN 0520202031. 
  9. ↑ Susan Noyes Platt (1999). Art and politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism : a history of cultural activism during the Depression years. Midmarch Arts Press. p. 165. ISBN 978-1-877675-28-7. 
  10. ↑ Hinkey, Douglas M. (1991). Federal art in Long Beach : a heritage rediscovered. Long Beach, California: FHP Hippodrome Gallery. p. 15. ISBN 0963058401. 
  11. ↑ Moore, Sylvia (1989). Yesterday and Tomorrow: California Women Artists. New York: Midmarch Arts Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-9602476-9-1. 
  12. ↑ Gerd Stern; Victoria Morris Byerly (2001). From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948-1978. Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California. p. 288. OCLC 48881709. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Commentary: Writing about Art" (PDF). MANAS Journal VI (4). November 11, 1953. 
  14. ↑ Helen Langa (2004). Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York. University of California Press. pp. 70–71. ISBN 978-0-520-23155-9. 
  15. ↑ James R. Lewis (2002). The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions. Prometheus Books. p. 88. ISBN 978-1-61592-738-8. 
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5 16.6 16.7 Hughes, Edan Milton (1986). Artists in California, 1786-1940 (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Hughes Publishing Company. p. 92. ISBN 0961611200. 
  17. ↑ http://www.wolfsonian.org/explore/collections/aviation-yesterday-plastic-demountable-mural-designed-western-airlines-coffee-sh
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3 Johnson, Mark Dean (2003). At work: The Art of California Labor. San Francisco: California Historical Society Press. p. 139. ISBN 1890771678. 

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