With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
Beatrice Laving Cuming
Education/Curation, Painting/Drawing, Printmaking
1903 – 1974
A WPA artist whose work was allocated to state institutions - hospitals, sanitoriums, schools - throughout Connecticut
- Biography/Description of Work
Beatrice Cuming studied with Henry Snell and also at the Art Students League, at Pratt Institute, and in France. In the 1920s she moved to Kairouan, Tunisia with her companion, author Dahris Butterworth Martin. In Tunisia, Cuming and Martin met an Arab who acquainted them with the local customs and taught Cuming Arabic. She returned to the States in 1933. Legend has it that she was on a train heading toward Boston in 1934 when she looked out the window, liked what she saw of New London, got off the train, and stayed. That year she also joined the Public Works of Art Project (later federal WPA); her work for the project included easel paintings and etchings depicting the New London area. Some of her most striking (and abstract) work were depictions of the mammoth machines in the town’s WWII boat-building factories, and a 1947 commission to paint construction of a submarine at the Groton base. She was active in numerous national and local arts organizations, especially those in Essex and Mystic, and exhibited frequently in the 1930s and 40s, won a number of prizes, and had several solo shows. Cuming offered art classes to children and adults at her New London studio in Bacon’s Marble Block at 128 State Street, taught art in New London public schools from 1936 until 1940. In 1937 she began managing the Young People’s Art Program at the Lyman Allyn Museum. Cuming designed her own home in New London in 1958; it included living space, a private studio and a teaching studio.
- Sources view
- WPA in Connecticut web site: http://wpa.cslib.org/index.php/483/cuming-beatrice/
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, at http://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=full=3100001~!212485~!0;
Mattatuck Museum: http://www.mattatuckmuseum.org/ArtForEveryone
Jim Collins and Glen Opitz, editors, Women Artists in America (Apollo, 1980); Social Security Death Index;
Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters (1986), p. 193;
Who Was Who In American Art (1985), p. 142;
Cecile Tyl research material on Beatrice Cuming [ca. 1913-1990],
'Artists’ Colony Opens Gallery At Noank,' Hartford Courant, August 26, 1947;
NYTimes several.
Bulk of Cuming's estate went to the Joslin Foundation, Boston, Massachusetts.
Historic Buildings of CT. http://historicbuildingsct.com/?p=18510 .
King, Noelle Warden. 2013. Mystic as Muse: 100 Years of Inspiration, Exhibit catalog. Mystic: Mystic Art Association, p. 72-73.
New Deal Art Along the River. - Associated Resource(s)