Esther Browdy Selikoff

Esther Browdy Selikoff’s art was inspired by nature, often depicting landscapes and detailed still lifes of the natural world. She worked in various artistic mediums including watercolor and ink. 

Esther attended Manual High School in Kansas City, Missouri, then Kansas City Teachers College, receiving her teaching credentials in 1928. Esther’s sister, Dorothy Browdy Kushner, was also a teacher and an artist. They studied art and traveled together in the 1930s and 1940s. The sisters studied watercolor privately with Ilah Marian Kibbey in her studio in Kansas City. In the 1930s and 1940s in the summer, Esther would travel with Dorothy on various road trips to New Mexico, California and Mexico. They also attended art classes at different institutions to earn credits toward a bachelor’s degree.

Esther enrolled art at the Art Students League in New York City in 1935, and also at the Art Institute of Chicago. There she studied with Irving K. Manoir, a regional landscape painter. In 1936, Esther studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute. She also attended the Los Angeles Art Center, University of Kansas, University of Wisconsin and University of Vermont.  

Esther was a teacher in the Kansas City Public Schools in the 1930s and 1940s. She taught at the Hyde Park School from 1930 to 1931; then she at the George P. Longman School from 1934 to 1939, and at Westport High School in Kansas City in 1940 and 1942. She also taught the Saturday morning public school scholarship class at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1945 to 1949. While working as a teacher, Esther continued creating and exhibiting her work and was a member of the Kansas City Society of Artists.

On December 25, 1949, Esther married Max Selikoff and moved to Dallas, Texas, where she was active as an artist and participated in exhibitions, including the Dallas Museum of Art’s Annual Exhibition of Dallas Painting, Sculpture, Photography.