More than 100 Aurora Historical Society members and guests turned out Friday, March 3 to preview an exhibit paying homage to famed Aurora artist Ruth Van Sickle Ford (1897-1995).
“Aurora’s Own Ruth Ford,” an exhibit of approximately 35 Ford paintings loaned by local collectors, will run through May 13 at the Society’s Pierce Art and History Center, 20 E. Downer Place in Aurora.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
Center hours are noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays.
Mary Clark Ormond, AHS Board president, said the exhibit will include gallery talks by Ford’s biographer, Nancy Smith Hopp, and Center art conservator and AHS assistant, Scott Sherwood.
Dates and times of the talks will be announced on the Society’s website, www.aurorahistory.org, and on Facebook (aurorahistory).
Hopp, an Auroran, self-published “Warm Light, Cool Shadows: The Life and Art of Ruth Van Sickle Ford” in 2011.
At the event, Hopp autographed the book for Mary and Bill Marzano of Aurora.
Ormond said a separate section of the exhibit is devoted to the “round house,” a modern residence that Mrs. Ford and her husband, Sam, commissioned in 1949 and lived in for 12 years.
An Aurora native, Ford was known as an artist, educator, and entrepreneur.
Her greatest fame came from the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts which she owned and operated from 1937 to 1961.
Ford taught there and at Aurora College, now Aurora University, and other Fox Valley locations.
Known for her bold use of color and free sense of perspective, 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.
—Al Benson