Gene Kloss

American, 1903-1996

BiographyBorn in Oakland, CA on July 27, 1903. Gene Glasier was introduced to etching by Perham Nahl at UC Berkeley where she graduated in 1924. After marrying poet Phillips Kloss in 1925, she furthered her art studies at the CSFA and CCAC. Gene Kloss had already established the beginnings of a distinguished art career in her native California when she first visited Taos on her honeymoon in 1925. She continued spending winters in Berkeley after settling in Taos, NM

A stalwart of the Taos art colony, she created paintings, watercolors and a prodigious number of etchings and aquatints—more than 625 in a seventy-year career. She earned the respect of all the members of the occasionally contentious Taos Society of Artists as well as the regard of her peers nationally, who elected her to Associate Membership in the prestigious National Academy of Design in 1950 and Full Membership in 1972—the first American woman printmaker ever to be so honored.

She is known today primarily for her many highly accomplished and innovative prints of the Western landscape and particularly of the lives and ceremonies of the many Pueblo people whom she befriended and esteemed.

She is now universally considered one of the major printmakers of the 20th Century.

Person TypeIndividual