Correspondence
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Rush, Olive, 1873-1966
setName: label: See more items in
content: Olive Rush papers
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 1.4 Linear Feet (Boxes 1-2, 8)
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1889-1964
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Archives of American Art
identifier: label: Identifier
content: AAA.rusholiv, Series 2
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents note
content: Correspondence includes personal and business letters from Rush's family and friends, clients, galleries, and administrators of the Federal Art Project. Subjects include personal matters, Rush's illustrations for magazines and books, private commissions of portraits and murals, the exhibition and sale of her work at galleries and other venues around the country, Rush's Federal Art Project murals in the 1930s, and her artistic association with and promotion of Native American artists. Sales of artwork are often documented in this series with notes from buyers.

Significant correspondents include Lou Henry Hoover (Mrs. Herbert Hoover); fellow Howard Pyle studio student Ethel Pennewill Brown Leach; Chicago artist Laura van Pappelendam; literary critic Marius Bewley; arts educator Dorothy Dunn; Hilla Rebay of the Guggenheim Foundation; curators Mary Cabot Wheelwright and Florence Bennett; writers Haniel Long, Witter Bynner, and May Sarton; and Brooklyn artist Beulah Stevenson. Federal Art Project administrators with correspondence in this series include Edward B. Rowan, J.L. Nusbaum, Edward Bruce, Holger Cahill, and R. Vernon Hunter. A few brief letters from Georgia O'Keeffe are also found.

Among correspondence are original prints sent as greeting cards from artists the Applegate's, C.W. Ashley, Josef Bakos, Gustav Bauman (1927, 1937, 1944), Kathleen Blackshear, Margaret Britton, Ruth M. Hallock, Edward and Jo Hopper, Marguerite and Charles Kassler (1929), Hannah McCord Rhett, Mary Riley, Will Shuster (1927), and Agnes Tait (1937). (Unless otherwise indicated, these cards are filed with undated correspondence.)

Received letters are sometimes annotated with Rush's detailed notes concerning the business at hand. Outgoing drafts of Rush's replies are also occasionally found. Fragments of letters are common.

Correspondence is arranged chronologically, with undated correspondence arranged alphabetically at the end of the series.