MARGARET WENSTRUP (1930-2008)
Available Work | Biography
Biography • Margaret Wenstrup (1930-2008)
Margaret Newland was born in Stanford, Kentucky. With no art classes offered in her rural community, as a child she copied pictures from calendars as her first art training. In 1949 Margaret enrolled at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana. She then went on to study at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1949 to 1953. Wenstrup received the Academy’s most prestigious prize the Wilder Scholarship in 1953 which she used to study with the Precisionist Ralston Crawford in New York. Crawford had taught at the Art Academy in 1940s. With Crawford, Wenstrup began to experiment with geometric abstraction.
Wenstrup returned to Cincinnati in the mid-1950s where she became one of several Modernists leading successful careers. Her circle included Charley Harper, known for his minimal graphic designs of wild life, and his wife Edie Harper, as well as Noel and Coletta Martin. Noel Martin was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1954 exhibition Four American Graphic Designers which included Ben Shahn, Herbert Matter, Leo Lionni, and Noel Martin. The Harpers, the Martins, and Wenstrup all had experienced Modernism in New York in the 1940s and early 1950s, but felt they could experiment more freely in Cincinnati. Cincinnati formed its first museum of modern art “The Cincinnati Modern Art Society” in 1939 and showed Picasso’s Guernica in 1940. The Modern Art Society continues to thrive today as the Contemporary Arts Center (renamed in 1953) in a building designed by Zaha Hadid.
In the 1950s Wenstrup experimented with minimal abstractions cast in plaster, which she made with Preston McClanahan who went on to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design. By 1957 Wenstrup was using contrasting colors to enliven her reductive geometric compositions. By 1964 a year prior to the Museum of Modern Art’s The Responsive Eye, Wenstrup had developed her own Op art compositions that activate the viewer in both black and white and rich purples and blues. Combining her experience of abstraction with Ralston Crawford with her interest in folk art such as quilts and weaving, the patterning of Op art was a natural development for Wenstrup.
Wenstrup was included in the traveling exhibition Forecast: Museum Director’s Choice, 1955 – 1962 organized by the American Federation of the Arts in 1962. She was included in the Contemporary Arts Center 2006-2008 exhibition Graphic Content: Contemporary and Modern / Art and Design. In five rotations, the exhibition featured Charley Harper, Noel Martin, Margaret Wenstrup, and Ralston Crawford as the historic artists and Ryan McGuinness, Malcom Grear, and Matt Mullican as contemporary artists carrying on their investigations of modern art and design.
The work of Margaret Wenstrup can be found in the following prestigious collections: Cincinnati Art Museum, OH; Cincinnati Public Library, OH; Cincinnati Bell Corporation, OH; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, NY; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.