Although I am not a fan of International Women’s Day or Women’s History Month (I prefer to focus every day on recognizing women’s importance and on women’s history and think that that is more important and also the better route), I won’t pass up the chance to honor Women’s History month in March and Black Women’s History month in April, so the next 8 Mondays I will be dropping a Badass Women post. Here’s the first one:
A writer, artist, museum founder and curator, and advocate for Native American culture and art, Mary Russell Ferrell Colton was an accomplished woman who followed her varied passions throughout her life.
Born in 1889 and originally from Pennsylvania, she went to the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and was a member of the “Ten Philadelphia Painters”, a group of ten women artists that also included Eleanor Abrams, Theresa Bernstein, Cora S. Brooks, Constance Cochrane, Arrah Lee Gaul, Katharine Marie Barker, Isabel Branson Cartwright, and Helen Kiner McCarthy. The group eventually branched out to include more painters and also sculptors. After her graduation, she opened a studio in Philadelphia and had shows there and in New York, and some of her prominent works are “Edmund Nequatewa”, “Sunset and Moonglow”, “Sedona from Red Ledge”, “Navajo Shepherdess”, and “Sunset on a Lava Field”.
After her marriage she moved to Arizona and opened the Museum of Northern Arizona with her husband. It was there that she worked to include Native American art in the exhibitions, as well as providing a history of the area, working with the Hopi tribe to not only catalogue their arts and crafts, but also to preserve them. She preserved thousands of artifacts and wrote 21 articles and two books on the techniques of Hopi craftsmen.
She also began a program of artistic events at the museum in the 1930s, including the Hopi Craftsman Show, that continues to this day. The Hopi Craftsman Show was intended as a showcase for Hopi artists and also to stimulate interest in their craftsmanship among the general public, and a craftsman show for the Navajo was also created in 1942.
Mary Russell Ferrell Colton continued to work with the indigenous peoples of the Southwest, as well as as the curator of the Museum of Northern Arizona until her death in Phoenix at the age of 82. Below are more pictures of her art.
