Ila McAfee was one of the most prolific painters of the Taos art colony of the mid-twentieth century, a Colorado ranching-country artist whose lifelong subject was the horse, and whose long career took her from Western landscape and Native American scenes to murals for federal post offices and over a thousand easel paintings produced across more than seven decades.
Ila Mae McAfee (1897–1995) was an American painter and muralist, born in the small ranching community of Sargents in southwestern Colorado, near Gunnison, and raised among the horses that would become the central subject of her work. Her formal art training began in Los Angeles at the West Lake School of Art and the Haz Art School (1917–1918), continued at Western State College in Colorado, where she earned a BA in 1919, and led her to Chicago, where she worked as a student and assistant to the muralist James E. McBurney through 1924 and was influenced by the sculptor Lorado Taft. She continued her studies at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1925 and at the Art Students League in 1926.
In 1926 she married the landscape painter Elmer Page Turner, and the couple visited Taos that year and settled there in 1928, building their White Horse Studio in 1929. Across the next six decades she produced more than a thousand easel paintings of horses, Pueblo and Native American subjects, ranch scenes, and Western landscapes, and during the 1930s and early 1940s painted four federal post-office murals through the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture, The Wealth of the West (1940) in Gunnison, Colorado, The Scene Changes in Edmond, Oklahoma, and others in Clifton, Texas, and Cordell, Oklahoma. In 1981 she was named Taos Artist of the Year. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, among others.