Olive was a true pioneer, not merely for her inspired trek west to the newly recognized state of New Mexico, but for what she was able to achieve over her forty-plus years of residence here. It was a time when many considered this high desert destination a “wild territory”, and Olive arrived alone, a single woman at forty-seven years of age, a self-supporting artist from a modest Quaker background. She brought with her an open and inquisitive attitude and a hardiness developed through farm life, education, and exposure to modern values. Sometimes misrepresented as a “retiring spinster”, Olive Rush was in fact one of the “New Women” of her time: a suffragette, an adventurer, a teacher, and a risk-taker seeking a less confined way of being a free woman than what was customary under the social strictures of life in the Midwest and the East Coast. She joined with many other free-spirited and courageous female transplants to the Southwest in exploring new possibilities, relationships, forms of activism, and creative expression.
Once settled in Santa Fe, Olive found herself surrounded by the cultural traditions of both the Spanish and Indian communities and the presence of experimental artists who, like her, had been drawn to the art colony seeking a new way of seeing and painting. Olive’s artistic expression changed significantly as she moved beyond her bread-and-butter reliance on commercial or literary illustrations and family portraiture in oil on canvas. Rush turned to a more intimate scale and style, using watercolors often as her medium and subjects from nature and local life in New Mexico. At the same time, the artist became even bolder as she ventured more deeply into the realm of mural painting, having taught herself the Italian “old world” method of fresco painting on fresh plaster. She found the traditional adobe walls of Southwest architecture an ideal “canvas” for her fresco work. With these novel artistic ventures, Ms. Rush built a new public reputation in the region and joined in close camaraderie with many local artists, writers, anthropologists and cultural adventures. A regular exhibitor at the new Art Museum in Santa Fe, Olive was also a frequent participant in national juried shows, and group exhibits of Southwest modernists and women artists, gaining recognition by collectors far outside the Southwest. Today her drawings and paintings can be found in at least twenty major museums.
After painting the adobe walls of her own home with lyrical frescos, Olive was commissioned to create larger murals in the homes and gardens of friends, including the heiress Mary Cabot Wheelwright, folk art museum-founder Florence Bartlett, and in public venues such as the dining room in the popular La Fonda Hotel. These initial experiments led to even more ambitious projects during the 1930s as Rush was commissioned to paint murals in the local public library, post offices and university buildings under the federal New Deal program. One of these postal murals in Florence, CO, was recently commemorated with a U.S. postage stamp. At age 60, Olive Rush was still balancing on scaffolding while painting her water-based colors into wet plaster high up on public walls.
The practice of wall painting led Olive to a new meaningful “calling”. When asked to paint the walls of the dining room in the local Federal Indian Boarding School, she offered to teach the students how to create their own murals there. The work by nine artists from mostly Southwestern tribes was a resounding success and this began a long relationship of encouragement and promotion by Ms. Rush of Native American artists. She managed to bring the work by young painters from the Indian School to the exhibition at the 1933 “A Century of Progress International Exposition” in Chicago. She later arranged travel and exhibits for the students to national museums including the Corcoran Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, and promoted the sale of their works in galleries from Santa Fe to New York. Olive felt a close resonance with these young artists, admiring the simplicity and directness of their artistic styles, the integrity of their spiritual traditions, and their respect for Nature.
Local Pueblo Indians, Hispanic neighbors, and cowboys from surrounding ranches found warm encouragement, welcome support and sometimes a place to stay at Olive’s studio on Canyon Road. This “ministry of hospitality” was generously offered to fellow women artists, young Quakers traveling across country, and family members as the Olive Rush Studio provided refuge for many. Throughout her life, Rush held a moral commitment in aid of the needy, the disenfranchised, and socially neglected. Her advocacy included marching for women’s rights, promoting social activism in her classes for art students in Nebraska, joining local groups in the defense of Native Americans’ rights to practice their cultural traditions, and in the 1940s, volunteering on relief projects for refugees after World War II.
In her later years, Olive’s art grew increasingly unrestricted by old criteria and less representational. As in the artwork of her chosen mentors (El Greco, Kandinsky, and Japanese brush painters), figurative interpretations of “reality” became less important and abstraction took on a larger role in her work. Some of her strongest work in the 1930s and 40s are watercolors depicting deer and antelope in airy, natural and sometimes ephemeral settings. These are often lightly painted, gentle in feel and “open” in the space she created on the paper. The quietness of these scenes has been compared to the silence of a Quaker Meeting, and it is possible that her repeated choice of depicting vulnerable, tentative, creatures such as these deer was Olive’s way of representing the soul or the tenderness of spirit she honored in all things.
Throughout her life, her subjects as well as her innovative painting styles reflected her religious principles and Olive Rush often acknowledged the spirituality of art:
