{"id":7205,"date":"2018-05-04T10:41:59","date_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/groups.etown.edu\/news\/?p=7205"},"modified":"2018-05-11T09:27:41","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T13:27:41","slug":"art-history-professor-shares-the-art-career-of-violet-oakley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/2018\/05\/04\/art-history-professor-shares-the-art-career-of-violet-oakley\/","title":{"rendered":"Art history professor shares the art, career of Violet Oakley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The art of Violet Oakley is as beautiful today as it was game changing at the turn of the last century. In an April 23 talk, Patricia Likos Ricci explained Oakley\u2019s influence as the first female artist to receive a commission for a civic building. Ricci is associate professor of the history of art and director of the Fine Art Division of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Elizabethtown College.<\/p>\n

Ricci\u2019s presentation was the third and final in the College\u2019s \u201cPresidential Community Enrichment Series,\u201d in which E-town opens its doors to the campus community. Mark Clapper, executive director of college engagement opportunities, introduced her.<\/p>\n

Ricci began her talk by introducing Oakley as an artist — a stained glass designer, portraitist and muralist — as well as a peace activist. An avid advocate for world peace, Oakley was born in 1874 and died in 1961, living to see both World Wars during her lifetime. Ricci said, at the beginning of Oakley\u2019s life, she lived through the \u201cGilded Age,\u201d but had a distaste for the period\u2019s excess. Instead, Oakley preferred what Ricci called a \u201cGolden Age,\u201d because of her idealistic and utopian ideals for American society. These ideals are portrayed in her art.<\/p>\n

\n

Oakley\u00a0was an amazing person and a pioneer for women artists.”<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oakley\u2019s murals can be seen in Pennsylvania\u2019s state capitol building in Harrisburg, a \u201chandcrafted building\u201d as Ricci put it, because many artists were hired to take part in its development and decoration.<\/p>\n

Though Oakley was the first female to be honored in this way, she was given a smaller room — the 40-foot-long Governor\u2019s reception room — to complete. As Oakley was the breadwinner for her family, failure was not an option. She was given $20,000 and four years to complete her murals, and she was one of the few artists to complete her project on time. She chose to portray William Penn\u2019s life, but knew little about his and Pennsylvania\u2019s history, so she used part of the $20,000 to take her mother and herself to England to learn more about Penn and the persecution that was experienced by the Quakers.<\/p>\n

Oakley was so fascinated that she wrote her own history about Penn and the Reformation of the Church. She came back to America and painted murals such as \u201cThe Foundling of the State of Liberty Spiritual,\u201d \u201cIntolerance and Persecution\u201d and \u201cThe Trial of Penn.\u201d Oakley \u201cbelieved in the power of images,\u201d as Ricci said, and did not use violent or negative images because of this. Her murals, instead, were hopeful and graceful.<\/p>\n

Later in her lifetime, after the death of the chief muralist at the State Capitol, Oakley was chosen to replace him. She was paid $100,000 for the position, which was a huge sum of money at the time. This was also a significant feat for Oakley because it showed how many of her male counterparts accepted her. When asked about this during the question-and-answer portion of the presentation, Ricci said that many of Oakley’s peers accepted her, and those who didn\u2019t simply ignored her. The architects who hired Oakley showed support for her art.<\/p>\n

Audience member Michelle Clapper, who has visited the home of John Huston, an E-town alum who is a collector of Oakley\u2019s art, said she found the talk thought provoking. \u201cIt was interesting to see the connection to that home and learn about what\u2019s in our backyard,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

According to Ricci, who has a personal connection to the artist and her art, \u201cOakley\u00a0was an amazing person and a pioneer for women artists. … I became involved in studying Oakley when I was a student. I interviewed Edith Emerson, Oakley’s\u00a0former student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts\u00a0and lifelong partner, who was then in her 80s. She lived in Oakley’s studio in Philadelphia and asked me to\u00a0help her catalog Oakley’s work. We arranged for the work to be given to museums when Edith\u00a0died. She was an artist also and an art history teacher. She was a great source of inspiration for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ricci recently helped to curate an exhibit about Oakley at the Woodmere Art Museum, called \u201cA Grand Vision: Violet Oakley and the American Renaissance.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>The exhibit was held from September 2017 to January 2018.\u00a0In addition to being a \u201cretrospective\u201d of Oakley\u2019s work, it also was a tribute to Emerson, who had once been a director of the museum.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elizabeth McIlhenney bio:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Elizabeth McIlhenney is a junior English literature major with minors in creative writing and art history. She is co-editor of Elizabethtown College\u2019s \u201cFine Print Literary Magazine\u201d and is president of Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society and Creative Writing clubs on campus. She hopes to either write for companies online or pursue a master\u2019s degree in library science or marketing.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The art of Violet Oakley is as beautiful today as it was game changing at the turn of the last century. In an April 23 talk, Patricia Likos Ricci explained Oakley\u2019s influence as the first female artist to receive a commission for a civic building. Ricci is associate professor of the history of art and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":7210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[774,5],"tags":[490,89,1128],"class_list":["post-7205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-arts-culture","tag-achievements-2","tag-art","tag-feature","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7205"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7226,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7205\/revisions\/7226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}