Kathleen
Blackshear was born in Navasota. She began studying art and music in
her early teens. She obtained a bachelor of arts degree from Baylor
University. After college she spent a year studying at the Art
Students League in New York City. From 1918 to 1924 she worked in
various teaching and design jobs and traveled to Europe and Mexico.
In the fall of 1924 she entered the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, where she studied with John Norton, Solon Borglum, Charles
Fabens Kelley, Frank Vincent DuMond,
William Owen, and Helen Gardner. In 1926 Blackshear was hired to
teach art history. She took students to the Oriental Institute and
the Field Museum of Natural History affirming the value of African
and Asian art at a time when non-Western art was usually studied
from an anthropological viewpoint. Along with Helen Gardner she has
been credited with shaping the distinctive style that emerged among
Chicago artists during the 1940s and the 1950s. Drawing on from her
early life in heart of cotton country of Texas she used blacks as
her primary subject matter from 1924 to 1940. Influenced by African
masks and textiles, Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne and
Georges Seurat, and Cubism, she worked in a simplified, geometric
style that became increasingly abstract in her later years. She
participated in over sixty group exhibitions sponsored by such
organizations as the Art Students League of Chicago, the Chicago
Society of Artists, and the Art Institute of Chicago, The Texas
Watercolor Society, The Southern States Art League, The Witte Museum
in San Antonio mounted the first solo exhibition of her work in 1941
and included her in two later exhibitions. She was also included in
group exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1930, 1934),
the Fort Worth Museum of Art (1930, 1935),the Dallas Museum of Fine
Arts (1936, 1939, 1953), The Texas Centennial (1936), Texas
Pan-American Exhibition (1937), The Texas State Fair (1938, 1939,
1953), The Texas General (1949), and Rice University (1965) . Her
work is included in the permanent collections of Southwestern
University in Georgetown, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the
Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Panhandle-Plains
Historical Museum, the Art Institute of
Chicago, and a number of private collections.