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 are 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. Spears initially studied textile design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; upon graduating, she decided she’d made the wrong choice and re-entered SAIC, redoing the entire program as a student of painting. John Norton, her advisor in painting, was considered progressive by the school’s standards; Spears still headed straight to Woodstock, New York, after graduating for the second time to study with sculptor Alexander Archipenko, believing he could push her art in a more modern direction. (She travelled to New York City and Paris for much the same reason). Eventually, Spears resettled in Chicago in 1937, returning once more to SAIC, though this time as an instructor of design and painting. Ever marked by that perpetual dissatisfaction, she also established two entirely new departments (silk-screening and enamel) during her tenure there.

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.