Recent Acquisitions: Thirty-Three Prints by Grace Albee

Posted on January 01, 2008 by Kristin Swan

Hood Quarterly, winter 2008

During the 1930s and 1940s Grace Albee (1890–1985) established her reputation as a highly skilled regionalist printmaker. Among her many awards and honors, she was the first female graphic artist ever to receive full membership in the National Academy of Design. She began to work seriously in wood engraving while she lived with her husband and five sons in Paris from 1928 to 1933. After moving in 1937 to a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, she focused on the rural subjects for which she is best known. Housing Problems, which won her first prize in the 1937 exhibition of the Philadelphia Art Alliance, offers a witty commentary on the nation's housing shortage during the Great Depression while revealing Albee's high level of technical skill. It is one of thirty-three Albee prints recently donated to the museum from what is believed to have been the second-largest collection of her work held in private hands.

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Written January 01, 2008 by Kristin Swan