Feb. 16 Olson Seminar explores work of female artist The life and work of Mary Hallock Foote, one of the few female western illustrators of the 19th century, will be the topic of the Paul A. Olson Seminar in Great Plains Studies. Jon Nelson, curator emeritus of UNL's Great Plains Art Museum, will discuss "Mary Hallock Foote: A Pre-Raphaelite in the West" from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Feb. 16 at the museum, 1155 Q St. Nelson's lecture and a 3 p.m. reception at the museum are free and open to the public. Foote, whose life was fictionalized by Wallace Stegner in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose, trained at the Cooper Union in NewYork City. Her marriage to a mining engineer took her west in the 1870s and her husband's repeated business failures prompted her to work as an illustrator for popular magazines to support herself and her children. Nelson will discuss how her engraved work is unique among that of other illustrators of western subjects in that its calm repose contrasts with the more dynamic pieces of her contemporaries. The Olson Seminar series is presented by UNL's Center for Great Plains Studies.
