Ruth Patterson Hart: Works on Paper

September 20 – November 2, 2008

As a young women in the late 1920s and 1930s, Ruth Patterson Hart studied at the Arts Student League in New York, spent a year studying etching in Florence, Italy, received her BFA degree from Mills College where she studied with Roi Partridge and with European modernists Hans Hoffman, Alexander Archipenko, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and earned her MFA degree from Colorado College. Back in Portland, she worked as a graphic designer and taught art classes at the Portland Art Museum School until she married attorney Allan Hart in 1941. The exhibition features approximately 40 works on paper on loan from Ruth Patterson Hart’s children: drawings, watercolors, and prints. Many of the works have not been seen since the 1930s, stored away in closets and under beds and yet bearing eloquent witness to a remarkable talent underestimated until recently.


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