Elizabeth Olds, a founding member of the screen printing unit, Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She studied at the University of Minnesota, the Minneapolis School of Art, the Art Students League, and with George Luks. The first woman to be awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship to study painting abroad, Olds travelled to Paris in 1926. Olds spent the early thirties in the Midwest where she executed a series of prize winning lithographs of the Omaha stockyards. She joined the Public Works of Art Project in 1934 in Omaha and began making lithographs depicting the activities of the relief agencies. Later, she moved to New York and worked in the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project with colleagues Anthony Velonis, Louis Lozowick, Ruth Chaney, Eugene Morely, Hyman Warsager and Harry Gottlieb, Olds was instrumental in developing screen printing as a fine art medium. She believed in an art for the people and in "Prints for Mass Production," an essay written in 1936, she

advocated the use of prints produced in large editions and circulated widely as a means of enlightening a culturally illiterate population. Because equipment for screen printing was light, simple, inexpensive, and large editions were possible, the medium was well-suited to her purpose of responding to the current American experience in a fast, relevant manner.

Olds' work reflects the enthusiasm, light-hearted energy and compassion of her character. Her directness and sense of humor were a well-received antidote to the difficulties of the Depression era. Her work is in collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Seattle Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and Glasgow University.

Merry Go-Round= 1940, Color Serigraph

Edition not stated. Signed, dated and dedicated To B. Usui from in red pencil on the image.

Image size 9 13/16 x 14 3/4 inches (250 x 375 mm); sheet size 10 1/8 x 15 1/16 inches (257 x 383 mm).

A fine, fresh impression, on heavy cream wove paper, in excellent condition. The margins trimmed to 1/8 inch outside the image all around.

$900.