By Al Benson
Approximately 70 persons gathered Saturday, Oct. 22, to celebrate Ruth VanSickle Ford’s 125th birthday.
Aurora Historical Society photo
Guests dined at the Aurora Country Club amid 50 oil and watercolor paintings loaned by patrons of the late Aurora artist, educator, and entrepreneur.
Ford (1897-1989) owned and operated the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts from 1937 to 1961 and taught art classes at Aurora College, which became Aurora University in 1985.
The Aurora Historical Society (AHS) sponsored the party, including a birthday cake.
After a champagne reception and buffet dinner, John Medernach, AHS board member, was the emcee of the event which doubled as an AHS fundraiser.
Guest speakers were Carl Franco, Aurora Fifth Ward alderman; John Jaros, AHS; Nancy Smith Hopp of Aurora, Ford’s biographer; and architect Sidney Robinson, who owns Ford’s former residence in Aurora.
A highlight of the event came when Hopp unveiled Ford’s “Man with Fighting Cock Haiti.”
She recalled purchasing the watercolor from the collection of Dr. Peter and Susan Starrett of North Aurora.
The painting hung behind a filing cabinet in the records storage area at the Aurora dentist’s office, she said.
“I took a photo of it and saved it because I was beginning to do research for the biography about Ruth,” Hopp said.
She published “Warm Light, Cool Shadows: The Life and Art of Ruth VanSickle Ford” in 2011.
This past Summer she had the painting reframed with conservation glass added to protect the colors and spacers to keep the glass off the art.
According to Hopp, her thought was to give it to Robinson for possible inclusion in a history of his house or donate it to the ever-growing collection of Ford art at Aurora University.
For the first time, Denise and Charles Lueth of Aurora saw at the party a Ford painting of their home on Prairie Street.
Mary Clark Ormond, AHS board president, added that Ford dominated the Aurora fine arts scene in the mid-20th Century and still has legions of admirers, collectors and former students around the country.
For persons who loaned paintings to the party exhibit, the Historical Society was host to a Sunday morning brunch at the Aurora Country Club.
Born in 1897, and raised in Aurora, Ruth Ford graduated from West Aurora High School and from 1918 from the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, an art school with a commercial focus.
She continued her studies in Chicago and New York under the tutelage of some of the most respected painters of the time, John Carlson, George Bellows, and Guy Wiggins.
She returned to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts to teach, and in 1937, became president and director of the institution, which she held until 1960.
Pulitzer-prize winning editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin is one of the hundreds of talented students she nurtured.
Ruth was the first woman from Illinois to be invited into the prestigious American Watercolor Society and the first woman artist member of Chicago’s renowned Palette & Chisel Academy.
In 1948, with architect Bruce Goff, Ruth and her husband, Sam, designed a home and studio on Aurora’s far West Side, called the Round House, that attracted international attention.
Known for her bold use of color and free sense of perspective, Ruth Van Sickle Ford exhibited her paintings throughout North and Central America for more than five decades.
She continued to teach and to paint up until her death in 1989.