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Nan Sheets
(1885-1976)
Painter-printmaker Nan Jane Sheets was born in Albany, Illinois in 1885. She took a degree in pharmacy from Valparaiso University, Indiana, and worked in that field for a short period in Salt Lake City, Utah. There, she took several art classes and realized that artistic expression was her true passion. She married Fred Sheets and moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma and then to Oklahoma City in 1914.
By 1910, she was a serious painter, but it was during the 1920s that she matured as a fine artist. She spent summers of 1919 to 1923 studying art at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs, and in 1923 went to Taos, New Mexico with Nellie Knopf and to Gloucester, Massachusetts with Hugh Breckenridge. she also painted in Maine, Woodstock, New York, and Nova Scotia and took several trips to Europe. From 1935 to 1943, she was a State Director of the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration.
Many of her paintings were mountain landscapes or had western themes and focused on history such as the settlement of Oklahoma. In addition to painting, she did much teaching of art, and she founded and served as first Director of the Oklahoma Art Center. She received many honors including induction into the Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center. Nan Jane Sheets died in 1976 in Oklahoma City.
Member: Art League of Oklahoma City; Oklahoma Art Association; Southern States Art League; National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, New York City; American Federation of Arts, Washington, D.C.; North Shore Art Association; and the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Source:
Phil and Marian Yosicki Kovinick, "Women Artists of the American West"
Jules and Nancy Heller, "North American Women artists"
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