Gretchen Schoeninger Corazzo

Gretchen Schoeninger Corazzo (1913–2016) was an American sculptor and artist.

Early life and education Corazzo was born on December 18, 1913 in Ravinia, a small community in Highland Park, Illinois, near Chicago. Her artistic talents were encouraged from an early age. Her mother, Hester B. Hall, was a teacher and her father, Joseph Schoeninger, was a businessman who specialised in printing. Her parents moved several times, often to provide more progressive schooling for their children. She attended the Francis W. Parker School (Chicago) and in 1922, she and her siblings boarded at the Heidehoff Schule near Stuttgart in Germany, as their father was negotiating the purchase of a rotogravure printing process. Still in Germany in 1923, the family stayed in the home of Anton Lang, a sculptor and actor who had played the part of Jesus Christ in the decennial Oberammergau Passion Play in 1900, 1910 and 1922. Lang gave her clay to model and she said that from then, "I always had a piece of mud in my hands, making something." After they left the institute, he became an artist under the Works Progress Administration, one of president Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agencies, while she sculpted in clay, from which she produced plaster casts, at the same time working for a company that produced dioramas for museums. In 1942 they had a joint exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1941, John and Xenia Cage lived with the Corazzos in Chicago and introduced her to Peggy Guggenheim. This led to her being invited to exhibit at the Exhibition by 31 Women held at Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in New York. She was one of only three sculptors alongside Xenia Cage and Louise Nevelson.

Her husband joined the army in 1943 and was posted to Burma while she moved back to Carmel, staying with her mother and working as a gardener. This influenced her later work that involved the painting of seeds. On her husband's demobilization they moved back to Chicago. He attended the Illinois Institute of Technology to study architecture, while she continued to create her abstract sculptures. During this period, they were friends with the architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and his daughter Waltraut, who worked at the Art Institute of Chicago. Corazzo's husband later worked for Mies van der Rohe. After their two daughters were born they moved to a farm in Chesterton, Indiana, which had a thriving artistic community. There she began collecting seeds and creating pictures using these.

In 2013 a retrospective of her work celebrated her 100th birthday, when she was still working to produce collages. The exhibition was held at the Box Factory for the Arts in St. Joseph, Michigan. Throughout her life, Corazzo had created art in various formats and styles, leaving a legacy of both innovation and of collaboration with other artists. Her works and papers are held at the Art Institute of Chicago.