Mary Fife Laning was an American painter and printmaker working in a social realist style with a feminist perspective.
Mary Elizabeth Fife was born on August 26, 1900, to Adison J. Fife and Catharine Campbell in Cleveland, Ohio. She grew up in Canton, Ohio.
In 1923, she earned a B.A. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1925âÂÂ1927, she did postgraduate work at Cooper Union, where she earned an award for best mural painting in 1926. In 1928, she studied at the Academie Russe in Paris.
From 1930 to 1935, she studied at the Art Students League under Kenneth Hayes Miller. There she met her husband, Edward Laning, whom she married on her birthday in 1933. The Lanings became part of the Miller circle with Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop.
The Lanings lived most of their lives in Brooklyn, New York. As a painter, muralist, and printmaker, Fife Laning explored social realist subject matter. Her art reflected life in New York in the mid 20th century, contributing to the style developed by the Fourteenth Street School of New York in the 1930s.
In 1937, her painting A Place in the Sun (1934) garnered acclaim at the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art. From 1936 to 1937, Fife Laning worked alongside Marsh and seven other artists for a Works Progress Administration-sponsored ceiling fresco in the U.S. Customs House. The other artists were Xavier J. Barile, Lloyd Lozes Goff, Ludwig Mactarian, Oliver M. Baker, John Poehler, J. Walkely, and E. Volsung. Recalling her work on the project, Fife Laning said: <blockquote>I would get up at three in the morning on a cold spring day and take the Broadway bus down to the Battery, where Reg would be waiting in the dark to board the tugboat which was going out to meet an incoming liner. . . Reg wanted details of lifeboats, davits, hawsers, ventilators, stacks, masts and rigging, sirens, bells, deck-chairsâÂÂeverything.</blockquote> In the 1940s, as a member of the National Association of Women Artists, Fife Laning taught (with her husband) at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1961, she was appointed the head of the art department at Birch-Wathem School, New York, where she remained until 1970.
She survived her husband by a decade, dying in 1991.
Fife's work was exhibited at the Butler Art Institute, Ohio, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 2015 at Enduring America: Selections from the Collection of Art and Peggy Hittner Exhibition organized by Northern Arizona University Art Museum. It is in the collections of the Whitney Museum and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
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