The Common Thread
Modern artists who used printmaking to uplift the working class and everyday people.
Featuring (online only) artists: Peggy Bacon & Isabel Bishop
Isabel Bishop, The Lunch Counter. Etching
“They are nobodies—anybodies, but they are modeled in a grand manner.” –Isabel Bishop
Isabel Bishop, Girl with a Newspaper. Etching
Isabel Bishop (American, 1902–1988) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1902 and raised around Detroit. She moved to New York in 1918 to enroll in the School of Applied Design for Women to study illustration. She later studied painting at the Art Students League. Working in Union Square in the 1930s, Bishop became a key member of the Social Realists called the “Fourteenth Street School”, including Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and others whose work was concerned with portraying regular New Yorkers in their daily lives. Bishop also taught at the Art Students League as the only female full-time instructor for the period, and taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among other institutions. She received many awards and prestigious positions, including becoming the first woman to hold an executive position in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1946. Bishop is best known for her paintings and prints of bustling urban life, especially young women in the workforce and in social settings. She worked from her studio in Union Square until 1984 and passed away in 1988.
Featured artist: Isabel Bishop
“I'd sketch going along on buses or on seeing something that was happening... I think the things that are worth drawing and painting are the things that are happening rather than posing.” –Peggy Bacon
Peggy Bacon, Country Dressmaking. Drypoint
Peggy Bacon (American, 1895–1987) was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1895 and raised around Connecticut, New York, France and England. In 1913, she studied at the School of Applied Arts for Women in New York, and then at the Art Students League of New York until 1920. Bacon was taught by many of the Aschan School’s most prominent artists and became a teacher herself through the 1930s and 40s at the Art Students League, Hunter College, and other institutions. While Bacon is best known for her drypoints, she also illustrated award-winning children’s books, was nominated for an an Edgar Allan Poe Award for her own mystery, book and received recognition for her caricatures, cartoons, and satirical drawings of New York which appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Fortune, and other magazines. Bacon worked and exhibited through the 1970s until her retirement to Maine where she later passed in 1987.
Featured artist: Peggy Bacon
