Barbara Maples

Barbara Lucile Maples (1912–1999) was an American photographer, artist, educator and professor. She is known for her work with modernist photographic techniques in the style known as Texas Bauhaus. Her work is part of the permanent collection of several museums.

Biography Maples was born in Temple, Texas in 1912. She graduated from the University of Mary-Hardin Baylor with a bachelor of arts in 1933 and then went on to get her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 1939. Maples attended Temple High School and graduated from there in 1929.

She taught art in the Dallas independent school District between 1937 and 1964 and also taught at the Dallas Museum of Art between 1940 and 1954. and was buried in the family plot in Temple. Maples studied printmaking during the summers between 1943 and 1945 with Lawrence Barrett. In 1944, Maples won an honorable mention for her painting, Satin Glass and Fruit in the Sixth Texas General Exhibition held at the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1959, Maples' print, Summer Madness (1956) was shown in the exhibition, "60 Prints by 60 Artists from Local Collections: Post-War Prints 1946–1959." Maples participated in an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1990 called "Photographic Abstractions: Barbara Maples & Carlotta Corpron."

Maples' work is part of the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the El Paso Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Her work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.