Gene Kloss was the most accomplished American printmaker of the Southwest in the twentieth century, a Berkeley-trained etcher who built her career around the landscape and Pueblo ceremonial life of northern New Mexico, and who produced more than six hundred etchings, drypoints, and aquatints across more than fifty working years.
Alice Geneva "Gene" Kloss (née Glasier; July 27, 1903 – June 24, 1996) was an American printmaker and painter, born in Oakland, California, and best known for her etchings of the New Mexican landscape and the ceremonies of the Pueblo peoples. She studied art at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in 1921, where she trained as a painter under Ray Boynton and learned printmaking from the etcher Perham Wilhelm Nahl. Following her 1925 marriage to the poet Phillips Kloss, the couple honeymooned in the Southwest — a trip that initiated her lifelong subject. From 1929 they spent every summer in Taos, eventually equipping a rented adobe below the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with a second-hand Sturges etching press, and they settled in Taos permanently in 1945.
Between 1924 and 1981 Kloss produced approximately 630 etchings, drypoints, and aquatints, often in combination, of New Mexico, the wider American West, San Francisco, and her native California. She was the sole etcher employed by the Public Works of Art Project from 1933 to 1944, was awarded the Eyre Gold Medal of the California Society of Etchers, was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1950 and a full National Academician in 1972, and showed her prints in major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. Her work is held in those institutions as well as in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, and other regional and national collections.