[Women]: [Art]: [Spongberg, Grace]: [Hayes, Hatti]:

[Small Archive of Materials by Noted Artist Grace Spongberg, Including a Wonderful Sketchbook, Plus an Assortment of Photographs Featuring Her and Her Longtime Companion, African-American Artist Hatti Hayes].

[Mainly Chicago, Il. 1948-1975]. Spiral-bound sketchbook, with nineteen full-page sketches, some in color and some in pencil, 12 x 9 inches; plus a finished color painting on art board, 14 x 9.75 inches; twenty-eight photographs, 3 x 3 inches to 8 x 10 inches; fourteen printed art exhibition catalogues; and a handful of ephemeral items. General overall wear. Very good. Item #4357

A wonderful archive of original artwork, photographs, programs, and assorted ephemeral items belonging to noted Swedish-American and Illinois visual artist, Grace Spongberg (1906-1992). Spongberg was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied under American Impressionists Albert Krehbiel and Louis Rittman. She traveled extensively in Mexico, Europe, and the Far East, which informed her work throughout her career. The Illinois Women Artists Project describes Spongberg's categories of artistic production as "Ceramicist, Lithographer, Painter-Oil, Pastelist, Photographer, Watercolorist." During her rich and fruitful career, Spongberg completed muralist commissions under the Works Progress Administration, painted private commissions, exhibited at numerous museums in the United States and around the world, and created a large body of paintings and lithographs that still trade on the art market today. Her four-panel mural in the lobby of the Bennett School in Chicago, completed as part of the WPA's Federal Art Project in 1939, is still on display there.

Grace Spongberg's original artwork is present here in two forms. The first is a quarto spiral-bound sketchbook in which she sketched a variety of subjects and settings. The drawings feature mostly urban scenes, with drawings of buildings, fountains, a clock tower, urban gardens, and other scenes. One of the color drawings appears to picture seven flags arranged before a hedge row, and may show part of the grounds of the United Nations in New York City. The second piece of original art here is a pastel impressionist depiction of what appears to be a Mexican woman carrying her small child on her back in a baby sling. The pastel was executed on art board, and is unsigned, but is unmistakably Spongberg's style. This piece was likely produced in the 1930s during her time working with the WPA, when she was known to have made lithographs of various scenes in Mexico.

In addition to the artwork, the present collection includes twenty-seven photographs. These images feature some of Spongberg's paintings, interior settings in her home, Spongberg engaging with others at an art exhibition, Spongberg at work on an architectural painting, and more. A pair of black-and-white photographs feature Humpty-Dumpty-like characters painted on a bedroom wall; the manuscript caption on the verso of each identifies them as one of Spongberg's commissions, described as "Decoration on nursery wall in a private home." Another photograph pictures a serigraph of Spongberg's painting, "Open Shutters, which according to the manuscript caption on the verso, was "Property of the Chicago Society of Artists - This is the 1951 print presented to lay members." Most interestingly, eight of the photographs feature Spongberg's longtime companion - an African-American artist named Hatti Hayes. Some of the photographs here feature the women both individually and together, from relative youth to both women in their elder years. These include two black-and-white portraits of a smoldering Hayes taken in her younger years. The two also apparently traveled together as early as 1954, where they both appear on the Passenger List of a Trans World Airlines flight from New York to Paris. According to one newspaper record in November 1951, the two women exhibited ceramics together at the Benedict Art Gallery of Hull House in Chicago. The exact nature of the women's relationship -- whether it was platonic or romantic -- is unknown to us, though they did in fact live together. The only envelope present here, a 1983 envelope sent by the Chicago Symphony Society is addressed to both of them at a Rush Street address in Chicago.

The present collection also includes over a dozen art exhibition catalogues. The catalogues date from 1934 to 1952. All but two of them feature various paintings, watercolors, or prints by Spongberg, but one relates to an art piece by Hayes, The latest-dated catalogue here, for the 1952 Wichita Art Association's Decorative Arts and Ceramics Exhibition, features a submission for an enamel plate by Hatti Hayes. In addition the material above, the collection also contains a handful of ephemeral items. Most notably are an unsigned two-page typed meditation on the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and a 1936 newspaper clipping memorializing Spongberg's prize-winning painting "Washington Square, Chicago," which garnered the "purchase prize" at the eighteenth exhibition of the Swedish-America Art Association. The clipping states that the painting would eventually head to Växjö, Sweden to be part of the town museum's permanent collection. According to the Illinois Women Artists Project, this painting, the aforementioned Bennet School mural, and another mural at the Mason Elementary School in Chicago are Spongberg's permanent holdings.

This is truly a case of the sum being greater than the parts, and provides a much-needed foothold in researching the little-known career of Grace Spongberg. The material also provides unique photographs documenting the long-term relationship between Spongberg and Hayes, the latter a distinguished artist in her own right.

Price: $2,500