Ethel Myers - Biographical Note

Ethel Myers was born in Brooklyn on August 23, 1881. She studied at the Chase School, later the New York School of Art, from 1898 to 1904. Her early subjects in drawings and oil paintings were the people of the Lower East Side. Her works were exhibited at The National Academy of Design, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Brooklyn Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The New York Ceramic Society.

In 1905 she married the artist Jerome Myers. Ater her marriage she began making small sculptures, some of them commissioned portraits of society women, others, characterizations of theatrical performers, and even studies of less prominent but more colorful New York personalities. She exhibited nine of her sculptures in the Armory Show of 1913. Mrs. Myers had one-man shows at the Folsom, Beilin and Knoedler Galleries. In 1914 she briefly visited France with her family.

She was assistant director of the New York School of Art and later taught painting and ceramics. During the Twenties and Thirties she also designed clothes and hats for many New York celebrities.

After Jerome Myers’ death in 1940, she lectured on his work all over the United States. At the age of sixty she returned to school to study creative writing at Columbia University. Shortly before her death she moved to Cornwall, New York, where she died May 24, 1960.