Olive Rush and Her Legacy
/INTRODUCTION
Following is an article written by Bettina Raphael regarding Olive Rush, and her home and studio at 630 Canyon Road. Listed on the Historic Santa Fe Foundation Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation as the Olive Rush Studio, it is a significant property that spans three distinct periods of the history of Canyon Road– as a farm house, the agricultural roots so difficult to see now on the street, the early Santa Fe artists colony, and finally, the long period of use for the Friends Meeting. It is a distinctive and quiet place on the bustle of the street. - Pete Warzel, HSFF Executive Director
WRITER’S BIO
Bettina Raphael is an art conservator in private practice. A professionally trained objects conservator, Bettina Raphael graduated with an M.A. degree from the Art Conservation Program in Cooperstown, NY in the 1970s. After a year’s internship at the Smithsonian Institution she went on to work with conservation studios in Virginia, Birmingham, England, at the University of Denver, and the Museum of New Mexico. Raphael has spent the last 30 years working in the Southwest focused on the preservation treatment and care of objects of archaeological, ethnographic and historic origin in museums and private collections. Raphael’s research interests have included the life and work of the 18th cen. restorer in Venice, Pietro Edwards; the construction and care of Southwestern tin decorative arts from the early 20th century; and most recently, the career trajectory of Olive Rush, the versatile and inspired painter who settled in Santa Fe, NM.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SIMONE FRANCES FOR OLD SANTA FE TODAY (5TH EDITION)
PHOTOGRAPH BY SIMONE FRANCES FOR OLD SANTA FE TODAY (5TH EDITION)
OLIVE RUSH AND HER LEGACY, AN ARTICLE BY BETTINA RAPHAEL
In 1966, the small Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) Meeting in Santa Fe, NM came to occupy its recent home, the historic house and garden of the painter, Olive Rush. It is an unlikely occurrence for a Quaker meeting to have a patron and even more so for the benefactor to be an artist, given Friends’ long history of disparaging the arts as frivolous and vain. Thus, Santa Fe Meeting’s relationship with our “patron”, Olive Rush, is quite unique and has been a source of pride as well as of controversy.
A birthright Quaker born in Fairmount, Indiana, Ms. Rush spent most of her 90+ years pursuing her artistic calling, first as an art student on the East Coast, later as a young illustrator and easel painter in New York, Indianapolis and Europe. During her last 46 years, 1920-1966, she settled in Santa Fe, the art colony of the Southwest, where she was often termed the “First Lady of the Arts”. In 1948, Ms. Rush was a founding member of the Santa Fe Meeting, a small group of 6 -8 members who met usually in each other’s homes. At her death, Olive’s 100 year-old farmhouse on Canyon Road provided a permanent meetinghouse to this group of Friends and a future center for Quaker activities that would also serve as a memorial to her parents and her own religious, artistic, and civic values.
The year 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of Olive Rush’s arrival in Santa Fe. It was also a critical moment in the development of the Meeting she helped found, as it struggled to integrate the group’s current spiritual and space needs with the responsibility of maintaining a significant historic property. It is an appropriate time to acknowledge both what this pioneering artist contributed to her Southwestern community and the difficult challenges the Meeting now faces in honoring her wishes to preserve the property she donated.
Born on an Indiana farm, Rush Hill, in 1873, Olive was one of seven children of the Quaker minister, Nixon Rush and his wife Louisa Winslow Rush. She showed a gift for drawing at an early age and was encouraged by her parents. Apparently their own artistic interests had been discouraged under earlier Quaker restrictions. At seventeen she left home to study art and history at Earlham College in nearby Richmond, Indiana. After a year, she entered the art program at the Corcoran School of Art in Wash. D.C., and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York City, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the Boston Museum School. Studying with the renowned illustrator Howard Pyle in Wilmington, DE, she honed her drawing skills, began an interest in mural painting and shared studio space there with her life-long friend and fellow painter, Ethel Pennewill Brown.
By the age of thirty, Rush had established a successful career as an illustrator in New York City, working on various publications including children’s books and women’s magazines of the day. She also painted portraits on commission, particularly of mothers and children. She made two trips to Europe to study with painters and to witness first-hand the modern art movement germinating there.
In 1914, at the age of 41, Olive accompanied her father on the minister’s missionary trip to Arizona and New Mexico. With his encouragement, she painted as they traveled. At the end of her first venture into the West, Olive’s art was acknowledged with an invitation to show her paintings in a one-woman exhibit at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe.
Inspired by memories of the beauty and drama of the Southwest and in search of new modes of artistic expression, Olive returned to New Mexico in 1920 and became “the first important American woman artist to settle in Santa Fe.” 1 With savings and a small inheritance from her parents, she purchased an old farmhouse on Canyon Road, which was to become the center of the burgeoning art colony. Once established in Santa Fe, Ms. Rush entered a new world of inspiring influences described here in her words:
“Artists are spiritual adventurers and the strange beauty of the Southwest country, splendid and generous, lyric at one turn, dramatic at another, invites us to dare all things. Compositions are marvelously made before our eyes, offering lesson after lesson in form and color.”2
Olive was a true pioneer, not merely for her inspired trek west to the newly recognized state of New Mexico, but for what she was able to achieve over her forty-plus years of residence here. It was a time when many considered this high desert destination a “wild territory”, and Olive arrived alone, a single woman at forty-seven years of age, a self-supporting artist from a modest Quaker background. She brought with her an open and inquisitive attitude and a hardiness developed through farm life, education, and exposure to modern values. Sometimes misrepresented as a “retiring spinster”, Olive Rush was in fact one of the “New Women” of her time: a suffragette, an adventurer, a teacher, and a risk-taker seeking a less confined way of being a free woman than what was customary under the social strictures of life in the Midwest and the East Coast. She joined with many other free-spirited and courageous female transplants to the Southwest in exploring new possibilities, relationships, forms of activism, and creative expression.
Once settled in Santa Fe, Olive found herself surrounded by the cultural traditions of both the Spanish and Indian communities and the presence of experimental artists who, like her, had been drawn to the art colony seeking a new way of seeing and painting. Olive’s artistic expression changed significantly as she moved beyond her bread-and-butter reliance on commercial or literary illustrations and family portraiture in oil on canvas. Rush turned to a more intimate scale and style, using watercolors often as her medium and subjects from nature and local life in New Mexico. At the same time, the artist became even bolder as she ventured more deeply into the realm of mural painting, having taught herself the Italian “old world” method of fresco painting on fresh plaster. She found the traditional adobe walls of Southwest architecture an ideal “canvas” for her fresco work. With these novel artistic ventures, Ms. Rush built a new public reputation in the region and joined in close camaraderie with many local artists, writers, anthropologists and cultural adventures. A regular exhibitor at the new Art Museum in Santa Fe, Olive was also a frequent participant in national juried shows, and group exhibits of Southwest modernists and women artists, gaining recognition by collectors far outside the Southwest. Today her drawings and paintings can be found in at least twenty major museums.
After painting the adobe walls of her own home with lyrical frescos, Olive was commissioned to create larger murals in the homes and gardens of friends, including the heiress Mary Cabot Wheelwright, folk art museum-founder Florence Bartlett, and in public venues such as the dining room in the popular La Fonda Hotel. These initial experiments led to even more ambitious projects during the 1930s as Rush was commissioned to paint murals in the local public library, post offices and university buildings under the federal New Deal program. One of these postal murals in Florence, CO, was recently commemorated with a U.S. postage stamp. At age 60, Olive Rush was still balancing on scaffolding while painting her water-based colors into wet plaster high up on public walls.
The practice of wall painting led Olive to a new meaningful “calling”. When asked to paint the walls of the dining room in the local Federal Indian Boarding School, she offered to teach the students how to create their own murals there. The work by nine artists from mostly Southwestern tribes was a resounding success and this began a long relationship of encouragement and promotion by Ms. Rush of Native American artists. She managed to bring the work by young painters from the Indian School to the exhibition at the 1933 “A Century of Progress International Exposition” in Chicago. She later arranged travel and exhibits for the students to national museums including the Corcoran Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, and promoted the sale of their works in galleries from Santa Fe to New York. Olive felt a close resonance with these young artists, admiring the simplicity and directness of their artistic styles, the integrity of their spiritual traditions, and their respect for Nature.
Local Pueblo Indians, Hispanic neighbors, and cowboys from surrounding ranches found warm encouragement, welcome support and sometimes a place to stay at Olive’s studio on Canyon Road. This “ministry of hospitality” was generously offered to fellow women artists, young Quakers traveling across country, and family members as the Olive Rush Studio provided refuge for many. Throughout her life, Rush held a moral commitment in aid of the needy, the disenfranchised, and socially neglected. Her advocacy included marching for women’s rights, promoting social activism in her classes for art students in Nebraska, joining local groups in the defense of Native Americans’ rights to practice their cultural traditions, and in the 1940s, volunteering on relief projects for refugees after World War II.
In her later years, Olive’s art grew increasingly unrestricted by old criteria and less representational. As in the artwork of her chosen mentors (El Greco, Kandinsky, and Japanese brush painters), figurative interpretations of “reality” became less important and abstraction took on a larger role in her work. Some of her strongest work in the 1930s and 40s are watercolors depicting deer and antelope in airy, natural and sometimes ephemeral settings. These are often lightly painted, gentle in feel and “open” in the space she created on the paper. The quietness of these scenes has been compared to the silence of a Quaker Meeting, and it is possible that her repeated choice of depicting vulnerable, tentative, creatures such as these deer was Olive’s way of representing the soul or the tenderness of spirit she honored in all things.
Throughout her life, her subjects as well as her innovative painting styles reflected her religious principles and Olive Rush often acknowledged the spirituality of art:
“The task of the artist, she writes is to 'explore in his own way the spiritual possibilities of his art. Until he does that he is guilty, along with the man in the parable, of misuse of talents the landlord has given him.’” 3
“I believe that all art should carry without effort ‘the outward signs of an inward grace’. You must learn your own best way of living and creating. You are an individual in art as in life.” 4
“For Rush, art could not be separated from how one lived one’s life, and likewise no aspect of life could be separated from her spirituality; thus, her studio and place of worship became one.” 5
Since Olive Rush’s death in 1966 until last year, her residence has served as the primary meetinghouse for Santa Fe Friends. The building’s interior retains the feeling of a private home with built-in features and cabinets from its first owner’s time and a lingering sense of calm that comforts many long-time attenders and visitors. Housed in the old adobe building is a range of original furnishings, Native American and Hispanic artifacts, personal memorabilia, and a variety of finished paintings and sketches by Olive. These along with archival records form the Olive Rush Collection. The combination of the historic structure, its forty years of use by the artist, its Quaker history, and the remains of original contents have come to embody the unique remembrance of a life and a period of Santa Fe history.
The house is now only one of two original artist studios remaining intact on Canyon Road. Over the years under the Meeting’s care, the historic building of mud walls and weathered wooden beams have required constant maintenance and occasional restoration projects just to keep it stable and functional. Up until recently, a portion of the Meeting’s limited funding had gone toward general up-keep and repairs of the building. Long-term preservation and conservation projects for the exterior structure and interior collection have had to be postponed.
In July 2022 the Santa Fe Meeting purchased a new property in the town to accommodate its need for a larger and newer space. This facility is appropriate to the group’s future plans. The age and intimacy of the old Rush facility, once valued as a comfortable “spiritual space” are now not so relevant and the stress of its upkeep today is considered a burden by many Friends. In recent months, the Meeting has explored selling the property, which would, I believe, override the original commitment made to Olive Rush to preserve and protect the studio and land for social not commercial use. Undoubtedly a property on Canyon Road could sell for a great deal of money with the likelihood of being converted to yet another gallery or residence or tourist shop, none of which were the uses Olive originally envisioned for her home and studio.
Meanwhile, members of the extended Rush Family from around the country have recognized the need to intervene for the perpetuation of this historic structure and its artistic legacy. They are proposing to assume responsibility for the property through the creation of a nonprofit foundation. Their vision is to make the facilities open to the public as an historic site honoring Olive Rush’s achievements, her Quaker values, and the importance of the art colony of Santa Fe. The Friends Meeting has remained divided on this offer. Olive envisioned just such a recycling or regifting of the property in conjunction with its preservation, when the Quakers would no longer need it.
This is a moment when history can be acknowledged and stewarded. The Olive Rush Studio, Garden, and Collection can remain a concrete reminder for all Santa Fe residents and visitors of Olive Rush’s contributions and the role Santa Fe played for over 100 years as the art capital of the Southwest. The Rush Home and Studio can continue as an active resource: the spacious garden a unique place of respite on Canyon Road, a home-base for resident artists and scholars, a venue for future exhibits of Olive’s art as well as the work of young artists like those Ms. Rush wished to nurture. Here is an opportunity for the community and art admirers to recognize the significance of the Olive Rush legacy, and maintain the integrity of this most important house, studio, and garden on Canyon Road.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Bettina Raphael, art and artifact conservator: bettinaraphael@msn.com
Liz Kohlenberg, great niece of Olive Rush and Chair of the proposed Olive Rush Memorial Studio: geoliz@comcast.net
Clerk of Santa Fe Monthly Meeting of Friends: sfmmclerk@gmail.com
FOOTNOTES
1. Stanley L. Cuba, Olive Rush: A Hoosier Artist in New Mexico, Minnetrista Cultural Foundation, Inc. Muncie, Indiana. 1992, page 45.
2. Stanley L. Cuba, Olive Rush: A Hoosier Artist in New Mexico, Minnetrista Cultural Foundation, Inc. Muncie, Indiana. 1992, page 43. From an artist statement in a 1925 exhibition catalog.
3. “Successes of Past Can’t Be Copied Forever, Says Miss Rush”, Santa Fe New Mexican, January 19, 1945, page 5.
4. “Thetford Le Viness Writes of Olive Rush in Kansas City Times”, Santa Fe New Mexican, January, 19, 1948.
5. Carol Gish, “Olive Rush: Spiritual Adventurer in the Southwest”, a paper written for the course “New Mexican Art and the Mainstreams” at the University of New Mexico, November, 1994, page 4.
