Ethel Spears

Looking at an Ethel Spears painting can feel a bit like playing Where’s Waldo. Playful, humorous, and rich in detail, Spears’s signature works were birds-eye views of everyday scenes, often set in her home city of Chicago, filled with a slew of characters, each highly occupied in their own little corner of the world.

Born in 1903, Spears’s early artistic years were marked by an itching dissatisfaction. She initially studied textile design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but upon graduating discovered she felt ambivalent at best about that career and decided to do the entire SAIC program over again, this time in the painting department, under the guidance of John Norton. Though Norton was considered progressive by the school’s standards, Spears graduated for a second time and went straight to Woodstock, New York, to take up studies with sculptor Alexander Archipenko, believing he could push her art in a more modern direction. New York City and Paris furthered her artistic exposure and education. Eventually, Spears resettled in Chicago in 1937, back at SAIC once more, though this time as an instructor of design and painting, as well as silk-screening and enamel (departments she herself established). 

Spears’s uniquely naive, witty, and deceptively elegant style won her gigs as an illustrator of books and a muralist for various educational institutions around Chicago, and also led to her work being exhibited at places like the Art Institute and the Whitney. Sometime in the 1950s Spears fell ill, potentially the result of lead poisoning from working with enamels so extensively. She lived out her final years in Navasota, Texas, with her longtime partner and fellow artist, Kathleen Blackshear.