CGA.2019.071: Francesca Piper, July 2019; CGA.2021.037: Piper, Francesca, May 2021
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Materials in this collection are available for use, but may be used in the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum reading room only.
Eli Goldman, January, 2025
The Glencora "Glen" Ketchum Collection focuses on her career as a cartoonists. The majority of the materials are tearsheets and clippings of Ketchum's Mayme the Manicurist comics, a one panel feature about palm-reading. There is biographical information provided her family and a print out of an entry for Allan Holtz's "Stripper's Guide," in addition to photographs of the artist in the late 1920s. The collection also includes a set of artists' tools used by the Ketchum.
This biography was provided by the donor:
Glencora "Glen" Ketchum was born in St. Louis (MO) on April 23, 1897. She studied art at the St. Louis Museum and Pratt Institute in New York. In 1917 she and opened her own commerical art studio in Chicago. By 1923 she sold her studio and went to Paris to paint portraits and figure studies, while working part-time as a journalist.
She returned to the United Staters in 1926 and became an advanced student at the Minneapolis School of Art. Her style had evolved from commerical art into technically sophisticated studies of individual persons, with a few drawings of European landscapes. To support herself, she continued to do commerical art work. In 1930 and 1931, she won several prizes for drawing and painting in Minneapolis. During this time, she won the Ethel Morrison Van Derlip $2,000 traveling scholarship. With this considerable sum, she traveled to Italy to study the technique of fresco painting.
Ketchum created several monumental fresco murals in Sorrento druing 1931-1933, which included the Sannino Villa and the Minerva Hotel Tea Room, which won renown throughout Europe. During this time she also painted a number of large mural-style oils, filled with generous human figures. Her family scenes, including an African-American family sitting on a porch and an Italian family of three generations, are notable for the feeling of warmth of human relationships they convey. In 1933, she married Francesco Maresca, an Italian hotel executive. They had two chidlren in 1935 and 1937. Concered about the war looming over Europe, she fled Italy in 1940 with her two children. Her husband, an Italian citizen, was required by law to remain in Italy.
With no other means of support, Ketchum began a career as an art teacher in Connecticut in 1940. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Teachers' College of Columbia University in 1945 and became the supervisor of Art Eduication in Stratford, Connecticut. During these years she created many watercolors of rural New England scenes which reflect a quiet Calm and a notable absence of human figures.
She passed away in Darien, Connecticut in 1982 at age 85.
This collection is arranged by format; paper-based materials in the first box and the physical artists' tool in the second and third boxes.
[identification of item],[Box Number, Folder Number], Glencora "Glen" Ketchum Collection, SPEC.CGA.GWK, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Ohio State University