Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel will revisit the work of a little known, locally beloved artist whose adaptation of batik, a Javanese technique of dyeing cloth, made her work a coveted modernist trend among New York’s elite in the 1910s and ‘20s. Born in Recklesstown, New Jersey (now Chesterfield Township), in 1886, Wallace grew up in the artistic community of New Hope, Pennsylvania, before moving to New York City and building a sensational reputation and successful business as a textile and fashion designer. However, with the onset of the Great Depression, Wallace returned to New Hope, where she struggled to maintain her career’s momentum amid economic upheaval. She remained in New Hope for the rest of her life, where she happily painted flowers from her garden and portraits of her darling cats.
Wallace’s story spans decades of culturally transformative eras in United States history, including first-wave feminism, the Roaring Twenties, the World Wars, and the Great Depression. Since her death in 1968, her body of work has remained behind the closed doors of private collections. Featuring batik “paintings,” garments, oil paintings, and archival ephemera, this exhibition will be the first public display of her work in decades, and the first ever solo exhibition of hers to be held at a museum. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, with essays by Assistant Curator Tara Kaufman and fashion historian Dr. Michael E. Mamp, aim to investigate how Wallace’s work—from her writings to her paintings and clothing designs—traces the development of two centers of modernism in the United States: New Hope and New York.
Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel has been generously supported by the Richard C. von Hess Foundation, Jeniah Johnson and Tom Sheeran, the Coby Foundation, Ltd., and the Michener Art Museum’s 35th Anniversary Initiative.
