Maxine Albro

Maxine Albro (January 20, 1893 – July 19, 1966) was an American painter, muralist, lithographer, mosaic artist, and sculptor. She was one of America's leading female artists, and one of the few women commissioned under the New Deal's Federal Art Project.

Biographical sketch Ethel Maxine Albro was born in 1893 in Ayrshire, Iowa, the daughter of Frank Albro, a grain buyer and piano salesman, and Cordelia Mead. She had an older brother, Francis, and a younger brother, Harold. Her father's family came from England and settled in Rhode Island before moving west, and her mother's ancestors were of Irish-English descent.

Photographer Imogen Cunningham took a portrait of a shrouded Albro in 1931.

On March 28, 1938, Albro married fellow artist Parker Hall in Pima, Arizona. They moved to Carmel, California, and together they would return to Mexico numerous times throughout their lives.

Albro was a member of the American Artists' Congress, California Society of Mural Artists, California Art Club, and the Carmel Art Association.

Works

Starting from 1925, Albro exhibited her works at the annual San Francisco Art Association show and influenced other artists to travel to Mexico, winning local fame as "a little Diego Rivera" and leading to numerous private commissions in 1929 and 1930, including the Spanish Farm fresco for the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, California.

Albro was one of the few women who were part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, a program initiated under President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Due to the high rate of joblessness during the Great Depression, these art programs were required to employ female artists, making this period the first time in history in which women were hired without discrimination in the United States. Her first WPA commission was for one of the murals at Coit Tower.

Throughout the 1930s, Albro executed many commissions under the federal program, including a mosaic at San Francisco State Teacher's College in 1936, None of the artists working on the mosaic had ever created art in that medium, and the WPA had to hire an Italian mosaic setter that taught them how to break marble to create mosaic pieces and set them. The mosaic is no longer visible, having either been stored and then lost, or destroyed during removal when the campus was moved and the Teacher's College building was renamed to Anderson Hall at the University of California Extension in San Francisco.

Outside of artwork commissioned for public buildings, Albro painted frescoes for many private homes,

Maxine Albro painted The Four Sybils on the walls of the central courtyard of the Ebell Women's Club in the 1930's. The "Portly Roman Sybils" offended some of the organization's members and the frescoes were painted over in 1935. That year, several prominent art critics, including the young Arthur Millier, rose to her defense.

"Personally I think they are beautiful decorations which deserve to live and which will be missed," Miller wrote.

Style

Albro's artistic style is described as "clean, bright and clear with the strong rounded forms of this era, often depicting the women of Mexico, in particular those of the Tehuantepec region in Oaxaca."

Her mural titled California at San Francisco's Coit Tower, which depicts the bounty of California's agricultural industry, was produced under the Works Progress Administration program.

In 1934, the Literary Digest wrote about Albro's California, comparing it to the other murals painted inside Coit Tower:

In particular, Albro was strongly influenced by Diego Rivera. "Watching Diego [paint] was very beneficial to me," she said. National Gallery of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, San Francisco's Coit Tower, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Allied Arts Guild, and in various galleries and private collections.