Nan Sheets

Nannine Jane "Nan" Quick Sheets (December 9, 1885 – September 1976) was an American painter, printmaker, and museum director. It has been said that she, along with Oscar Jacobsen, created the artistic community in central Oklahoma.

Biography Born in Albany, Illinois, Sheets graduated in 1905 from the School of Pharmacy at Valparaiso University. She then moved to Salt Lake City, working as a prescription clerk while studying art in her free time. In 1910, she married Fred C. Sheets, a physician who had formerly been a classmate, and moved with him to Oklahoma, living in Bartlesville and Muskogee before settling in Oklahoma City in 1916. She began taking summer classes with John F. Carlson at the Broadmoor Academy of Fine Arts in Colorado Springs in 1919, earning a special prize in landscape.

Sheets turned her home in Oklahoma City, "The Elms", into a salon for local and visiting artists. Every summer she traveled and painted, offering her work for sale upon her return. Her art began to be seen in local museums, such as the Dallas Museum of Art, the Witte Museum and the Fort Worth Art Museum; in 1923 she was included in Who's Who in American Art, and invited to join the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.

Among other pursuits, Sheets wrote on art for the Daily Oklahoman from 1932 to 1962; she also wrote an art column for The Oklahoma Woman magazine. She retired from the Center in 1965, dying eleven years later. One of her paintings is in the collection of the Oklahoma State Capitol. An oral history interview is held by the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution; it was conducted as part of the Archives' New Deal and the Arts project. Today JRB Art at the Elms Gallery is part of the Paseo Arts District. Sheets was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1953.