Mildred Bryant Brooks

After graduating high school with a penchant for printmaking, Brooks studied at the University of Southern California (USC), the Otis College of Art and Design, Chouinard Art Institute, and Stickney Art Institute. During her final years at USC, she paired her course load with an assistant teaching position, launching a parallel passion in arts education that would continue for the rest of her career.

Brooks earned twenty-two national and international awards beginning in the 1930s. Driven by a tenacious entrepreneurial spirit and the need to support her husband and two children during the Great Depression, Brooks utilized her growing fame as an artist to build an expansive and enduring one-woman business. In addition to professional etching work, she produced Christmas cards, printed for her contemporaries (a rarity for women artists at this time), and became a local fixture of interior decorating and design. To supplement teaching engagements, Brooks lectured and led technical workshops at colleges, art associations, women’s clubs, libraries, and community centers throughout Southern California.

Though Brooks was celebrated throughout her career for etchings of trees – a subject for which she had particular affection and talent – she also turned her keen eye for detail, exceptional technical skill, and curiosity to the diverse desert and ocean landscapes of California. Many prints also explored poignant symbiotic relationships between the human and natural worlds.

Drawn from the gifts of Beth Bryant Tucker and made possible with the Mildred Bryant Brooks Art Fund, this exhibition celebrates the breadth of Brooks’ pioneering career as a woman artist and educator in the 1930s and 40s. This digital gallery features a selection of prints from the JSMA’s permanent collection; archival photographs of Brooks at her printing press; and excerpts from her 1959 educational film, The Art of Etching. This exhibition was curated by Emily Dara Shinn, 2019 Mildred Bryant Brooks intern, with contributions from Danielle Knapp, McCosh Curator, and Jacob Armas (B.A., History of Art and Architecture and International Studies, 2019), 2018 Mildred Bryant Brooks intern.