The Foremothers of Western Art
By Chadd Scott on
“Essential West” has been highlighting origins the past two months.
The origins of Modern Native American art.
The origins of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
The origins of painter Clyfford Still.
The origins of Indigenous storytelling in North America.
Another origin story this week: women artists in Colorado and Utah.
History Jackson Hole presents “Women Artists of the American West: Colorado and Utah, 1885–1940” (January 20 through June 30, 2026), the second in a two-part exhibition highlighting trailblazing women in the western United States. This first presentation centered Montana and Wyoming.
The series highlights white women. Mostly painters and photographers. Of course there were women Indigenous artists in these areas for hundreds of years before the settlers arrived with brushes and easels and cameras.
Featured now are Colorado artists Helen Henderson Chain, Elisabeth Spalding, Anne Gregory Van Briggle, and Laura Gilpin, and Utah artists Louise Richards Farnsworth, Mabel Pearl Frazer, Florence Ellen Ware. If those names aren’t familiar to you, don’t be ashamed. That’s the point.
The exhibitions are presented by AWARE, the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, a non-profit association based in France dedicated to shining a light on women and non-binary artists of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. This new chapter continues the mission of AWARE’s work, demonstrating that there are and have been women working – often achieving national or international success – as artists in every region around the world in every time.
“I was surprised that I found women artists from the 19th century, early 20th century, because in my mind, these regions (the Rocky Mountain West), and even the States at that time, there were a few art schools, and a few big cities, and a few very well-known men artists, but not so many women artists that I knew of,” AWARE Founder and exhibition co-curator Camille Morineau told me in advance of my visit to Jackson Hole for the first part of the exhibition last year. “I was surprised by the number of interesting women artists and by the quality of what they did, and the radicality of the practice. There were so many photographers (and) the painters had very much in mind international modernity.”
Morineau makes an important point. These women artists working across the West were well-traveled and educated. They were in the know with what was taking place in the wider art world despite their geographic remove from it.
Morineau was unfamiliar with Western Art prior to the president of AWARE’s U.S. based chapter, Veronique de Champvallier Parke, pitching her on the idea of producing a show highlighting the genre’s female artists. Parke is an art collector and advocate with a home in Jackson Hole. What Morineau discovered upon visiting art museums across the Rocky Mountain states proved eye opening.
Florence Ellen Ware, ‘Dry Creek, Autumn at the Foot of the Mountains, Utah County,’ 1930. Oil on board, 16 x 20 in. Gift from Ron & Judy Radcliffe. Copyright courtesy of Springville Museum of Art.
Early Women Painters in Colorado and Utah
In Wyoming and Montana women artists often worked in isolation. Those based in more populous states built collaborative networks like the Denver Artists’ Club, which later grew into the Denver Art Museum. Across their stories, we see a determination to create, connect, and boost women’s voices in the West.
The careers of the featured artists illuminate lesser-known chapters of Western Art and reveal how the West was never the simple, masculine, rugged frontier that lives large in the American conception – and Western Art – but something layered, nuanced, and multi-gendered.
The exhibition begins in the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century when women were pushing for voting rights and issues of public sanitation, humane housing, and public education were being brought to the forefront of American society. It concludes in the 1930s when President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs offered new opportunities for women artists and intellectuals. During this period, Denver and Salt Lake City emerged as key cultural centers.
In Denver, Helen Henderson Chain founded the city’s first art school in 1877, followed by other art associations like the all-female LeBrun Art Club and the above-mentioned Denver Art Museum. In Salt Lake City, though the art world was largely male dominated, several women succeeded in making their mark, using art both as a means of public expression and as a bridge to philanthropic work.
The shows and the accompanying catalog illustrate the key role that women have played in furthering art and culture, even in places and time periods where it might be assumed they were the least active.
Laura Gilpin, ‘Landscape Class, Broadmoor Art Academy, at Work in the Garden of the Gods, Aug. 1920.’ Platinum print 7 916 x 9 316 in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Bequest of the artist. © 1979 Carter Museum
The Artwork
The artwork these women produced holds up to their male contemporaries, not that that’s any kind of surprise. Gender bias explains why women artists then, before then, after then, even now, receive less notoriety than male counterparts.
Louise Richards Farnsworth stands out. She was born in Salt Lake City in 1878. As was typical for these artists, she was traveled and educated. She studied in New York at the Art Students League, the premiere instructional institution in the country at that time. She went on to study in Paris. Her work was exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon in 1904. She was favorably reviewed in The New York Times.
She painted Utah landscapes in a vibrant, post-Impressionist, Fauvist style similar to Sven Birger Sandzén (1871-1954). I mention Sandzén only as a point of reference due to his vastly greater national renown; I have no reason to believe either influenced the other.
Soaring mountain peaks. Bold colors. Dramatic shadows.
“Women Artists of the American West” includes her masterpiece, Blue Shadows, circa 1898-1969, from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
Utah’s Mabel Pearl Frazer (1887-1981) also studied at the Art Students League and spent time studying the Old Masters and contemporary art in Europe – theme alert – spending 14 months in Italy starting in 1930. She was a member of the art faculty at the University of Utah for 33 years.
Mabel Pearl Frazer, Desert Landscape, c.1925, oil on canvas, 10.5 x 13 5-16 inches, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 1981. Copyright Image courtesy of BYU Museum of Art, 1981.
The exhibition shows off a beautiful, reserved, quiet Desert Landscape, circa 1925, from the Brigham Young University Museum of Art comparable to the best of Maynard Dixon (1875-1946). Again, citing the famous male artist only for context.
Again, therein lies the point. Pity we don’t know Farnsworth and Frazer the way we do Sandzén and Dixon. While not forgotten, their career achievements have been supressed. Gender, not talent, diminished their notoriety. Thanks to the efforts of AWARE, Morineau, Parke, History Jackson Hole, and others, they are finally emerging from the shadows.
