Ilah Marian Kibbey

Ilah Marian Kibbey was born in Geneva, Ohio, on February 23, 1883. She attended the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Kansas City Art Institute. She studied art under Hugh Breckenridge, Charles Wilimovsky, Henry B. Snell, Lester Stevens and Eliot O’Hara.

In 1920, she was named the registrar at the Kansas City Art Institute. Previously she was employed in the Kansas City Public Schools as a teacher. She also maintained a private studio in the 1920s while working these jobs.

She belonged to many organizations, including the Society of Independent Artists,  the Prairie Water Color Club, and the Kansas City Society of Artists. She was the secretary of the Kansas City Society of Artists when it dissolved in 1937. In 1922 she was elected a member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.

In the early 1930s she rented a studio at Lighton Studios at 1718 Holly Street in Kansas City. In 1933, she moved her studio to Westport.

In 1930, she made a series of landscape paintings of overhead views from flights she made over Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri titled Airplane Impressions. These paintings were exhibited at Ferargil Galleries in New York and, later, at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. Her works can be seen at multiple institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress.

In 1936, according to an article in The Kansas City Star, she was named the supervisor of a WPA mural project for Southeast High School. Roland Thomas and four other artists were also involved in the project. Scenes from books by Mark Twain were the theme of the murals, and they were displayed in the library at the school.

She died in Kansas City, Missouri, on August 10, 1957.