Letha Churchill Walker

Letha Estelle Churchill Walker was a prolific painter who enriched the Kansas City arts community during the 1920s and 1930s. 

Letha Churchill Walker was born in Osawatomie, Kansas on June 23, 1892. Her father was a hardware merchant, and the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, when she was around twelve years old.

Letha Churchill Walker knew she wanted to pursue art from an early age. In 1914, she graduated from the University of Kansas with an emphasis in art. She later spent time at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1923, she graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a degree in painting. During her time there, she began exhibiting her work in the Midwestern Artists' Exhibition, in which she continued to participate in for the next ten years.

After graduating, Letha Churchill Walker joined the Kansas City Society of Artists and began showing her paintings in their group exhibitions. Through her involvement with the Society, she became acquainted with other leading artists in Kansas City, including Gertrude Woolf Lighton, Ilah Marion Kibbey, Walter Alexander Bailey, and many others. Walker received acclaim from art critics at the Kansas City Star for her watercolor landscapes and oil still lifes.

In 1927, Letha Churchill Walker married Oliver Walker; they had two children. He was an electrician and civil engineer. They remained in Kansas City until Letha Walker's father, with whom they were living, died in 1937. Oliver and Letha then moved with their children to York, Pennsylvania.

In York, Letha Churchill Walker continued painting and exhibiting her work. She was an active member of the York Art Association and the Plastic Club of Philadelphia. She often participated in local shows and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Oliver Walker died in 1960, and the next year Letha Walker returned to Kansas City. She continued to paint at her residence until she died in 1968. 

Following her death, she left an endowment of $300,000 to the University of Kansas to be used for art purchases and scholarships. The works purchased with her bequest were exhibited at the University's Spencer Museum of Art in 1980 in A Decade of Collecting: The Letha Churchill Walker Memorial Collection. One of the few documented examples of Letha Churchill Walker's oil painting belongs to the museum's permanent collection: a portrait of her mother, Estelle Siggins Churchill.