Dorothea Mierisch

Dorothea Mierisch (1885–1977) was an American artist born in New York City in 1885,^[1] and she died in Hopewell, New Jersey in 1977.^[2]

Study for The First Official Airmail Flight (1941), mural for the post office at McLeansboro, Illinois

She exhibited at the biennials of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1930 and 1935, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1935 and 1936, the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors (where she received a prize in 1933), the Montclair Museum (receiving a medal) in 1933, and at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1936.^[3]

In 1936, Mierisch participated in the annual exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago and presented a painting titled Abandoned Quarry.^[4] In 1939, she created a mural for the post office of Bamberg, South Carolina, representing a map of the cotton trade routes in the 19th century.^[5] The U. S. Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned the work.^[6]

Child's Bonnet, 1938, in the Index of American Design

In 1941, she painted another mural, "The First Official Airmail Flight", at the McLeansboro, Illinois, post office, celebrating a flight that took place in the town on September 26, 1912. A study of this mural is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.^[7]

The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. owns a lithograph by Mierisch, as well as five of her drawings rendering clothes, as part of the Index of American Design.^[8]

References

1. Mecklenburg, Virginia McCord (1979). The Public as Patron: A History of the Treasury Department Mural Program : Illustrated with Paintings from the Collection of the University of Maryland Art Gallery. University of Maryland, Department of Art. p. 93.
2. "Dorothea Mierisch". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 2019-03-13.
3. Falk, Peter Hastings, ed. (1999). Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America. Vol. 2. Sound View Pres. p. 2268. ISBN 0932087558.
4. Art Institute of Chicago (1936). Catalogue of the forty-seventh annual exhibition of american paintings and sculpture. Chicago. OCLC 886342774.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
5. "Post Office Mural – Bamberg SC". Living New Deal. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
6. Miller, Minnie (June 22, 2015). "Bamberg Post Office home to New Deal mural". The Times and Democrat. South Carolina, Orangeburg. p. A 1. Retrieved 11 April 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
7. "First Official Airmail Flight, McLeansboro, Illinois, September 26, 1912 (mural study, McLeansboro, Illinois Post Office)". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 2019-03-13.
8. "Artist Info". National Gallery of Art, Collections. Retrieved 2019-03-13.