CARLOTTA CORPRON

Born in Blue Earth, Minnesota, Carlotta Corpon, moved with her family to India, where her father was a missionary surgeon. She returned to the states in 1920 to attend college, receiving a master’s degree from Columbia. In 1935 she moved to Denton to teach art history and advertising design at Texas Woman’s University, she continued teaching there until 1968 when she retired Professor Emeritus. During her period of teaching she worked as an assistant to Moholy-Nagy, German Bauhaus artist, in 1942, when he was teaching at TWU. In 1944 she met with György Kepes (Chicago Bauhaus instructor) often while he was teaching a semester at North Texas State University, also in Denton.

Her best known work is of light abstractions. Corpron’s photographs were included in the exhibit, Recollections: Ten Women of Photography, in 1980, curated by Margaretta K. Mitchell. Also in 1980, an exhibition at the Amon Carter included 43 of Corpron’s photographs from her major experimental groups: nature series, fluid light designs, light follows form series, light drawing, and space compositions; a monograph was published by the Amon Carter Museum with introduction by Martha A. Sandweiss, Curator of Photography at the Amon Carter. Carlotta Corpron’s work is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Amon Carter Museum, and others.

IDA LANSKY

Ida G. Lansky was born in 1910 in Toronto, Canada. She pursued many careers in her lifetime including Nursing, Art, and Library Science. In 1928 she moved to New York City and later attended New York University, The Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn, NY and Cornell University. In 1942 she received a B.S. in Public Health Nursing.

Ida Lansky moved to Hawaii in 1945 and married Irving Lansky. She then moved to Nor- man, Oklahoma and then to Denton, Texas where she studied art and was mother to two children, Ellen and Michele.

From 1954 - 1959 she was in the Visual Art studies program at Texas Women’s University in Denton with an emphasis on photography. She studied under Carlotta Corpron.

1959 marked a peak in her art career when she exhibited her photographs in a group exhibition curated by Henry Holmes Smith at the Art Center Gallery at Indiana University. Her photographs were exhibited among many well-known figures in the photography world including: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, and Harry Callahan.

Ida Lansky continued to exhibit her work up until 1960 when she decided to study Library Science at Texas Women’s University. She received her Master of Library Science degree with honors in 1967.

Her new career lead to working at the University of Texas at Arlington. She divorced her husband in 1970 and continued working as a librarian. She died in Dallas in 1997.

Ida Lansky’s work is included is private collections and major institutions such as, El Paso Museum, the Amon Carter Museum and the New York Public Library.

BARBARA MAPLES

Barbara Maples was an artist and professor of art, born in Temple, Texas. She received her Bachelor of Art’s degree from the University of Mary-Hardin Baylor in Belton, Texas in 1933 and a Master of Fine Art’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York in 1939.

She studied with Lawrence Barrett at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and Carlotta Corpron at Texas Women’s University in Denton, Texas.

Maples taught both elementary and secondary art in the Dallas Independent School District from 1937-1964 and concurrently taught children’s classes at the Dallas Museum of Art from 1940-1954.

From 1965-1978 she was Professor and Head of the Department of Art Education at Southern Methodist University.

One-person exhibitions include the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas; Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, Texas; and the Witte Memorial Museum in San Antonio, Texas.

Barbara Maples is included in a number of private collections, as well as, the Corpus Christi Art Foundation, the Dallas Museum of Art, El Paso Museum, and the Amon Carter Museum.

GYÖRGY KEPES

Born in Selyp, Hungary. Studied painting and design in art school in Budapest. Collaborated with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy on light and design experiments in Berlin and London from 1930 - 1936, during this time he began making photograms and developed an interest for abstract photography. He came to the United States in 1937 to join Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago (Institute of Design). He headed the Light and Color Dept. In 1946, he started teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became Director Emeritus of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He wrote a significant book called, The New Landscape, in 1965 which explored how our visual image of the world has expanded due to the scientific and technical revelations of photography.