WOMAN IN ART
The artist puts the landmarks of South Carolina where the rest of the world can see, even if they never cross the Mason and Dixon line.
Most people avoid a swamp, but our artist friend is up with the dawn and steals amid the morning shadows to enjoy the heron at home. She pictures a covey of those birds in their native haunts amid a primal growth of big cypress trees. They are unafraid, enjoying life and freedom, in the trees, in the water, and on the wing.
Alice R. Huger Smith is represented in the Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston, and the Delgado Museum in New Orleans. She is an original artist, working in her own way at her chosen subjects, hence she has learned to be her own best critic.
Camelia Whitehurst, of Baltimore, is another member of the Southern States Art League. Her subjects are what everybody is interested in—everybody that is human—for Miss Whitehurst loves children and paints them as if she did. She has won the first prize in three annual exhibitions of the League, also several honors of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.
It is a very promising outlook for the future of art in our south and southwestern states that so many of the younger generation of artists are augmenting the growth of the Southern States Art League. That seems to refer to number, but not merely, for there are many sincere, enthusiastic workers, who realize the value of art to a nation, and of work to the highest achievement in art.
The president of the Southern States Art League, Professor Ellsworth Woodward, gave the address at the dedication of the new Art Museum at Atlanta, Georgia. At the banquet given in honor of the donor of the museum, Mrs. Joseph Madison High, Mr. Woodward gave the assembled art association this significant suggestion: "Take good care of your artists. They constitute your defense against the commonplace and the standardized. It is they who realize a people's inner life, love, and longing, and interpret them to the world. Art is the preservation of high ideals. It is also one of the most practical of pursuits, for it dominates the markets of the world."
The women painters of America are annually showing more impressive, charactered, and pleasing results in figure painting and portraits, which is an encouraging indication of progress. And very properly, for the study of mankind is Man. But man lives in an exceedingly beautiful world, as varied in its seasons and moods as the human nature it supports, yet it is surprising how few devote themselves to landscape painting. Although woman has her freedom and prerogatives in most things, there are duties and varying hindrances to her
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