Mary Fife Laning

© Estate of the artist. Photograph and digital image © Delaware Art Museum. Not for reproductio…
Mary Fife Laning
© Estate of the artist. Photograph and digital image © Delaware Art Museum. Not for reproduction or publication.

Mary Fife Laning

American artist, 1900–1990
BiographyA painter, printmaker, and muralist, Mary Fife was born in Cleveland and raised in Canton, Ohio. After earning her B.A. at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, she moved to New York City, where she attended Cooper Union and the Art Students League. At the League she studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller, among others, and met her husband, Edward Laning. In the 1930s, she worked in a Socialist Realist mode, depicting the lives of New Yorkers. During the Depression under the auspices of the WPA, Fife Laning was one of several artists who worked on murals in the U.S. Customs House. Mary Fife Laning exhibited professionally as both Mary Fife and Mary Fife Laning.

Fife Laning taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and was a member of the National Association of Women Artists. Her work is in museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Person TypeIndividual
Terms
  • New York
  • Cleveland
  • artists
  • female