Mary Rhodes

Mary Rhodes was a trained painter and teacher who helped open the Artists' Co-operative in an old French laundry on Mill Street in Reno in 1966, taught art classes at Lake Tahoe and in Carson City, won prizes in juried shows on both sides of the Sierra, and by 1969 had carried her easel to the desert at Palm Springs, where she became a leading light of the Shadow Mountain Palette Club. The Reno, Carson City and Coachella Valley papers followed her for nearly twenty years, and together they give a clear picture of a working professional who painted flowers, mountains, rocks and growing things, and the vegetables of her own kitchen. Our canvas, a golden hillside with a winding track and banks of lavender grey brush, is signed in orange red at lower right, Mary Rhodes.

Trained in the East

The fullest account of her background comes from the Nevada State Journal of 29 May 1969. Mrs. Rhodes, it said, had studied painting and given painting instruction all across the United States, receiving her art degree and her first training in the East. That puts her well apart from the self-taught amateurs who filled many regional shows: she arrived in Nevada as a qualified painter with a teaching career behind her. The newspapers do not name her school, and we have not yet found it.

A Charter Member on Mill Street

In the spring of 1966 a group of Reno painters rented the front rooms of the old Escallier French laundry at 627 Mill Street and opened a gallery run by the artists themselves. Susan Moss Galloway, visiting for the Nevada State Journal on 29 May 1966, listed the fourteen members whose work hung at the opening, Mary Rhodes among them, alongside Lyle Ball, Velda Morby, Marge Means, Betty Molteni and Marie Roberts, later known as Mahree Roberts. Every later account calls her a charter member of the Artists' Cooperative of Reno.

She was busy from the first season. In late July 1966 the society columnist Mary Frances Lynn announced the co-op's Garden of Flower Paintings show, a summer exhibition of flowers in oil, watercolour, acrylic, collage and ink by the members, Mary Rhodes among them. The same column named her chairman of an art show at the Carson City Mall on 27 August. In August 1967 the co-op's Vacationland show found her ranging from the dry hills of Virginia City to the sea coast.

Artist of the Month, 1969

On Sunday 1 June 1969 the co-op held a reception for two featured artists, Mary Rhodes and Betty Molteni. By then, the Nevada State Journal reported, Mary Rhodes was living at Palm Springs, and she had brought to Reno especially for the show large and small landscapes, flower paintings and a number of kitchen paintings, vegetables and fruits painted on wood. She had recently taken special instruction in desert landscape and planned many paintings in that field.

In September 1969 she was back in the news as the Artist of the Month at Home Furniture, the Reno store at Sierra and Island Avenue, which hung a local painter's work on its sixth floor each month. The store's advertisement in the Reno Evening Gazette carried her photograph and a short citation. It introduced her as Mrs. Mary Rhodes of Carson City, a charter member of the Artists' Cooperative of Reno, praised her outstanding florals and her ability to capture the basic form, simplicity and emotion in mountains, rocks and growing things, said her work had won many awards in juried shows in both Nevada and California, and noted that she had taught art classes at Lake Tahoe and in Carson City.

The Shadow Mountain Palette Club

In the desert she joined the Shadow Mountain Palette Club of Palm Desert and quickly became one of its pillars. At the club's juried show in March 1969 she took second place for still life in the professional division. At its Zodiac Ball in March 1971 she and her house guest, Gladys Bowman, a former secretary to Governor Charles Russell of Nevada, handled the sales for the club's Dollars for Scholars paintings, a link back to her Carson City years. In 1973 she was general chairman of the club's annual dinner dance, Come to the Cabaret, at the Indian Wells Country Club, where original oil paintings were given as door prizes and one lucky guest went home with a Mary Rhodes. In 1974 she again donated a painting for the club's Mardi Gras Ball.

Reno did not forget her. When the Artists' Co-op celebrated its tenth birthday in May 1976, Velda Morby wrote that four of the charter members now lived and painted in California, Mary Rhodes of Palm Springs among them, and that they would come back for the celebration.

Later Years

In February 1984 a Temecula resident named Mary Rhodes took three awards in the fine arts competition at the Riverside County National Date Festival at Indio: a third for a landscape in oil, Old Barn, Deluz Country, a second for an oil still life, Eggplants and Squash, and a third for an abstract, Earth, Water and Light. The vegetable still life and the landscape are exactly the subjects the Reno papers described in 1969, and the Date Festival was the Coachella Valley's great annual show, so we think it very likely the same painter, still working and still winning in her later years.

Reading Our Painting

Our canvas is a landscape of the kind she was praised for. A pale dirt track climbs out of the foreground and bends over a rise of tall grass gone gold, with green slopes and blue ridges beyond under a soft cloudy sky. Low rounded shrubs in grey violet and lavender crowd the left of the path and the hillside at right; they could be sagebrush in the Nevada hills after rain or wild lilac in a California spring. The grass is laid in with long, slanting strokes of yellow, ochre and violet, the shrubs built up in short, thick touches that stand off the canvas, the hills blended smooth so they fall back into distance. It is basic form, simplicity and feeling for growing things, almost word for word the 1969 citation.

The walnut-stained frame with its linen liner is a typical American gallery frame of the 1960s and 1970s, the years in which she was showing in both states.

Why Mary Rhodes Matters

Mary Rhodes is a fine example of the professional painter who built the art life of the small Western city: a trained artist and teacher who helped found a cooperative gallery, ran shows, taught classes, judged and won prizes, and then carried the same energy to a new community in the desert. Her name never reached the national indexes, but for twenty years two regions knew it well.