Ada M. Rapp

Ada Rapp was an artist and designer who taught at the Kansas City Art Institute during its early years. Although Rapp has not been documented as thoroughly as some of her peers, between 1900 and 1915 she contributed to Kansas City's creative history through her work as an artist and educator.

Ada M. Rapp was born on February 22, 1874, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Irvington, New Jersey. Her father, Frank Rapp, worked at a factory that processed coal into coke, while her mother, Ella Rapp, was a homemaker, raising Ada and her sister, Nellie.

As soon as she came of age in the 1890s, Ada Rapp set out for New York to study at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, the Prang Educational Company, and Pratt Institute. After graduating in 1900, she moved to Kansas City and began teaching art at Manual Training High School, a school that prioritized courses in arts and crafts. Rapp went on to spend several more summers studying abroad at the Royal College of Art in England and at the Munich Artists' Association in Germany.

Upon the completion of her summer studies in 1909, Ada Rapp was hired as an instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she taught decorative and applied design. She was also an art teacher at Westport High School. Rapp was a member of the Arts and Crafts Society, frequently helping organize exhibitions and contributing her own artwork. 

A 1911 article published in the Kansas City Star identified Ada Rapp with a group of talented Kansas City craftswomen including Delle Miller, another artist, Art Institute alumna, and high school teacher. The article stated that "Miss Ada Rapp works with modeled and tooled leather," two processes for engraving designs and shaping objects from leather (_Kansas City Star, _July 16, 1911).

In 1915, Ada Rapp married George L. Proctor, a Californian cattle rancher originally from Kansas City. The next year, she moved to a ranch in Sonoma, California, where she lived for the next twenty-six years. There are few records of her life after her time in Kansas City.

Ada Rapp Proctor died suddenly at age of sixty-five near Healdsburg, California. In her obituary in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, she was described as a "widely known Healdsburg matron" (Press Democrat, March 1, 1941).