Floy Campbell

Floy Campbell was born in Weston, Missouri, on August 31, 1873. Her father, Milton Campbell, was a lawyer, and his status gave her access to a well-rounded education. After graduating from Central High School in Kansas City, she attended Columbia University in New York and the Kansas City Art Association and School of Design in the early 1890s. In 1893, she went abroad to study at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. While there, her instructors included Eduardo Leon Garrido, Charles Cottett and Lucien Simon. She also studied with the Art Students League of New York.

Upon returning to Kansas City in 1896, Floy Campbell took a position teaching art at the Manual Training High School. At the same time, Campbell opened her own studio in room 317 of the Lyceum Building, located at 104 W. 9th St. She belonged to several arts organizations in her career, including the Kansas City Society of Artists, the Kansas City Paint Club, Society of Women Artists in Paris, Boulder Artists Guild, and the Kansas City Art Club, for which she was secretary.

After living, working and actively exhibiting in Kansas City for seventeen years, Campbell moved to Puerto Rico in 1913 to teach art at the University of Puerto Rico, eventually becoming head of the program. In 1920, Campbell moved back to Kansas City and became the head of the Art Department at the Kansas City Junior College. For the next fifteen years she contributed her work to artist exhibitions, participated in local groups, and continued writing, teaching and painting. Campbell retired from her teaching career in 1935 and moved to Boulder, Colorado, where she continued to work as an artist until her death in 1945. She named the Kansas City Art Institute the beneficiary of her $40,000 estate, which now exists as an endowed scholarship.

Floy Campbell was an accomplished painter, illustrator and printmaker. Influenced by her study of French Impressionism and European Expressionism, Campbell used fluid, colorful brushstrokes to capture life around her. Her subject matter included landscapes, still lifes and portraits. She painted an official portrait of her sister, Cora Campbell, principal of the Bancroft School in Kansas City, to be hung in its auditorium. She contributed a portrait of Rev. Dr. A. B. Brown, a professor of Washington & Jefferson College, where her father attended in the 1850s.

Campbell exhibited her work in Paris, New York, Boulder and Los Angeles. She mounted several solo exhibitions throughout her career at esteemed galleries and her own studio. She also contributed work to group exhibitions with the Kansas City Paint Club, the Gertrude Woolf Lighton Studio, the Findlay Gallery and the Kansas City Art Institute. Alongside her study of painting, Campbell was a skilled illustrator and printmaker, creating drawings and prints for newspapers, magazines and books.

Floy Campbell was a prolific writer. She wrote extensively about art historical subjects, ranging from Modern Expressionism to Ancient Symbolism. She delivered several art history lectures at the Kansas City Art Institute during the 1920s. She published her ideas about art and education in magazines such as The School Arts Magazine and newspapers like the Kansas City Star.

Her writing was a form of self-expression as well as a mode of academic study. In 1900, she published Camp Arcady, a novel about a young woman studying art in New York alongside three other women: Raphaelina, a painter, St. Cecilia, a musician, and Sarah Siddons, an actress. The account draws directly from her experience at the Art Students League of New York and offers unique insight into the lives of women artists during the 1890s. She also published poetry in various literary magazines, using rich, painterly imagery to reflect on nature and philosophy.

Floy Campbell's love for art also found expression in her career as an educator. In an article titled "The Collecting Instinct in Art Education," Campbell outlined a series of projects designed to encourage students to interact thoughtfully with local art exhibits by creating their own handmade booklets using newspaper and magazine clippings. Campbell believed serious engagement with art was a social necessity. During her time teaching at the Manual Training High School, Campbell helped talented students who lacked means to get work-study jobs at the Kansas City Art Institute in order to pay for their education.

Campbell passionately advocated for the value of art and the need to financially support artists. Throughout her work as an artist, writer and teacher, she strove to cultivate "a public that is convinced of the value of art as a public asset, and that has a lively personal concern about all artistic movements in the city" (Campbell, "The Collecting Instinct," 512).