Rush's career rests on a particular kind of generosity unusual in the history of twentieth-century American art, a willingness to teach, to host, and to advocate for younger artists, particularly the Pueblo painters whose careers she helped to launch, alongside her own steady and stylistically restless studio practice.
Rush came to art from a Quaker household that took her vocation seriously. The Rush Hill farm childhood, the early encouragement from her parents, and the unusually broad sequence of art schools she attended through her late teens and twenties placed her among the best-trained American women painters of her generation. The New York illustrator's work with the Tribune gave her early professional independence, and her studio relationships with Howard Pyle and Ethel Pennewill Brown shaped her early commitment to mural painting and to women's collective working spaces.
The 1914 first trip to Santa Fe was the decisive geographic event of her life. The Palace of the Governors exhibition gave her an early Southwestern audience, and her decision six years later to move permanently placed her within the small but unusually generative pre-Society-of-Artists art colony then emerging in the city. The Canyon Road farmhouse she bought became one of the working centres of the local art and literary community, and her open-house practice, she offered hospitality to visiting Quakers, Pueblo neighbours, Hispanic friends, cowboys, and women painters, made the studio a kind of community institution.
Her most consequential institutional contribution came through her work with Pueblo painters. When the architect John Gaw Meem asked her in 1929 to paint the murals at the Santa Fe Indian School, she declined to take the commission herself and instead trained the school's students to paint them. The technique she developed, true fresco on plaster, but also tempera-on-canvas murals that could be rolled and shipped, became the basis of the school's mural program, and the painters she taught included Harrison Begay, Awa-Tsireh, Pop Chalee, Pablita Velarde, and Narciso Abeyta (Ha-So-De), several of whom went on to define Native American painting in the second half of the twentieth century.
Her own painting moved across the same decades from her early Impressionist-influenced canvases through the realist subjects of her New Mexican neighbours, Pueblo dancers, Hispanic farm workers, Santa Fe street life, and finally into the abstract and modernist work of her last years. The WPA mural commissions of the 1930s gave her major public-art platforms, and the Maisel's Trading Post mural in Albuquerque remains among the largest surviving public works of any New Mexican woman artist of the period.
Her religious life ran in close parallel with her artistic one. She founded the Santa Fe Monthly Meeting of Friends, which gathered at her home for decades, and on her death she left the Canyon Road property to the Quakers; the studio is now operated as an artist's house museum and art centre by the Olive Rush Memorial Studio organization. The 1963 oral history that the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art recorded with her, completed three years before her death, remains the principal first-hand account of her life and work.