Frances Strain
American artist, art administrator, and curator 1898–1962
Born in Chicago, Strain attended the Art Institute, working with George Bellows and Randall Davey when they taught there in 1919-20. Strain and Biesel were among a group of students who joined Davey in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the summer. There they met and befriended John Sloan. Strain and Biesel returned to New York, staying with Sloan and his wife Dolly at 88 Washington Place in Greenwich Village and returning to Santa Fe with the Sloans the following summer. Though Biesel and Strain settled in Chicago by 1922, they would spend most of their summers in Santa Fe throughout the 1920s.
Biesel and Strain imported Sloan’s ideas about art exhibitions to Chicago, forming the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, modeled on the Society of Independent Artists. Strain was actively involved in almost every independent exhibition and exhibition group that emerged in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s. She began to organize exhibitions at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, where she became exhibition director in 1941.
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
American painter, etcher, and illustrator, 1871–1951
American artist, 1919–1991
American artist and musician, born 1957
American painter, etcher, and illustrator, 1892–1978, born in Greece
