Mary Fife Laning

Mary Fife Laning was an American painter and printmaker working in a social realist style with a feminist perspective. She grew up in Canton, Ohio.

In 1923, she earned a B.A. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1925–1927, she did postgraduate work at Cooper Union, where she earned an award for best mural painting in 1926.

From 1930 to 1935, she studied at the Art Students League under Kenneth Hayes Miller. There she met her husband, Edward Laning, whom she married on her birthday in 1933. The Lanings became part of the Miller circle with Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop.

In 1937, her painting A Place in the Sun (1934) garnered acclaim at the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art. From 1936 to 1937, Fife Laning worked alongside Marsh and seven other artists for a Works Progress Administration-sponsored ceiling fresco in the U.S. Customs House. Recalling her work on the project, Fife Laning said: I would get up at three in the morning on a cold spring day and take the Broadway bus down to the Battery, where Reg would be waiting in the dark to board the tugboat which was going out to meet an incoming liner. . . Reg wanted details of lifeboats, davits, hawsers, ventilators, stacks, masts and rigging, sirens, bells, deck-chairs—everything. It is in the collections of the Whitney Museum and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Paintings Girl with Open Blouse (1925) Place in the Sun (1934), tempera and oil on Masonite panel; 24 x 30 inches Forbidden Love (1935) The Lovers (1st Stoop) (1935) Klein's Dressing Room (1930s) Rocky Shore Newport RI (undated) Untitled (1946) Painting of Mary and her sisters in Greece.

Exhibitions Sources: Annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago, 1935 Third Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1936 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1937 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1940 Portrait of America Exhibition, organized by American Artists for Victory, Pepsi-Cola Company, 1945 Missouri Exhibition, St. Louis Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 1946 Exhibition of Kansas City Artists, Centennial Art Museum, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1949 Kansas City Art Institute Faculty Exhibition, 1950 National Association of Women Artists Exhibition, organized by National Academy of Design, 1967 Between Heaven and Hell: Union Square in the 1930s, Sardoni Gallery, 1996 New York Intaglio Figure, 1917 to 1954, Susan Teller Gallery, 2006 Enduring America: Selections from the Collection of Art and Peggy Hittner Exhibition, organized by Northern Arizona University Art Museum, 2015

Awards Source: National Association of Women Artists' Lillian Cotton Award, 1966 The National Academy of Design Figure Prize, 1967 The Pen + Brush Prize, 1969