New Article on Elsie Lower Pomeroy's Citrus Paintings! 🍊🎨

I’m thrilled to share that a new article on Elsie Lower Pomeroy’s citrus paintings has been published in California History (University of California Press)! Elsie’s painting We Grow ‘Em (1939) graces the cover of the entire issue! Huge thanks to Dr. Lauren Freese (Professor of Art History, University of South Dakota), whose deep research—including a fellowship in the USDA archives—led to this fascinating study of Elsie’s work.

From the article’s abstract:

“American artist Elsie Lower Pomeroy’s career can be considered in two phases: her precise scientific watercolors of fruit varietals for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and her extensive body of work featuring California life, landscape, and agriculture. A strong interest in agriculture and nature persisted throughout Pomeroy’s varied career and led to her series of five watercolor paintings of the Southern California citrus industry, completed in 1937. Pomeroy leveraged rhythmic abstraction and her knowledge of citriculture to bridge art and agriculture. The series contrasts the dangers of industrial orange cultivation with the economic and culinary upside, especially for the wealthy growers who profited from the labor depicted. Furthermore, while the series incorporates skills and knowledge from the artist’s USDA training, it represents a clear departure from pomological illustration, a genre closely associated with women, in favor of genre scenes that feature revealing portrayals of the danger of industrial citrus.”

One thing that stood out to me was the term “citraculture”—a word I hadn’t encountered before. It captures the full range of cultural, economic, and environmental factors tied to citrus farming. Reading this article made me think more deeply about how Elsie’s meticulous USDA botanical illustrations connect to her later paintings of California agriculture and farming landscapes.

This publication is such an exciting milestone in keeping Elsie’s work in the public eye, and it’s given me fresh motivation to continue sharing more of her story. Thanks to everyone who follows along and helps bring Elsie’s art and legacy back into the light! More soon!

Hello Again, World.

What a year+ it has been here on earth. I am writing this in July 2021 as life emerges from the Covid-19 pandemic, and as I reflect on where I want to spend some of my personal time going forward. How many of us have been asking ourselves existential questions these last months about where we spend our energy, where we want to cut back, or where we want to plant seeds to grow? “How we spend our days, is how we spend our lives” wrote the author Annie Dillard. My days are most often spent thinking about my professional work at the Portland Art Museum, where I serve as the Director of Learning & Community Partnerships. It’s a wonderful job with amazing colleagues. On a very good day, I get to think about art and I get to work closely with artists. I am grateful. And yet this last year has been incredibly tough. We’ve laid off incredible staff and done our best to keep the museum afloat. We will keep going… We will keep trying to do better.

This brings me to this post. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about “Project Elsie Lower Pomeroy” and I deeply want to keep it going and to keep trying to do better. There is so much potential in sharing the story of Elsie, whose life and work is begging to be known by a wider audience (and I have SO many ideas on how to do that). As I think about where I want to put more energy, it will be right here. I can’t promise that anything I write will be poetic or pithy but I hope it will be a window into an artist’s life and time.

I have done an okay job of posting on Elsie’s Instagram page @elsielowerpomeroy this last year +. I am hoping that if you are reading this you have also followed along there. We have 98 whole followers, thank you very much. If you haven’t followed please pay it a visit. I may try to transfer some of the content from there, over here. In particular, I am excited to share the recent publication of An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts: The US Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection (Atelier Editions, 2021). A first of its kind, this book gathers a rich selection of images from the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection where from 1886 to 1942 a stable of a few dozen artists, including a small number of women, painted the fruits and nuts of a growing American agricultural landscape. Elsie painted for the USDA when she was in her early 20s and a student fresh from the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. Elsie is one of 9 artists featured in the book. I just received my copy of this beautiful publication and I will plan to write some posts about it as I make my way through it, Until then, maybe get your own copy or see if your local library is willing to carry it. It was recently written about in both The New York Times and The Washington Post so it seems to be making an impression.

Let the journey begin...

Hello! It’s been a few months since I set-up this website dedicated to the art and life of Elsie Lower Pomeroy. I am slowly learning how to build it out and to add content so thank you for your patience. This website is my small contribution to remembering a great-grandmother and a woman artist who I personally never knew. Elsie died in 1971, the year after I was born, but I grew up in a house where she was everywhere. Her watercolors hung on almost every surface and in every room of our Southern California home. I came to know her artwork before I even had an inkling of who she was as a person. One of my aims with this website to get Elsie’s story and her work back out in the world. While in her own lifetime she enjoyed a strong reputation as a part of the California Scene Movement and active member of many California watercolor societies, she’s been largely forgotten by the larger art world (a problematic term since there are so many different art worlds). I look forward to sharing more. Please get in touch anytime through the contact page if you have questions. Onward!