Olive Rush was an Indiana-born painter, illustrator, muralist, and Quaker who settled in Santa Fe in 1920 and became one of the most generous and consequential figures of the city's mid-twentieth-century art world, both for her own paintings and for her foundational work training the young Pueblo painters who would shape modern Native American art.
Olive Rush (June 10, 1873 – August 20, 1966) was an American painter, illustrator, and muralist, born on a family farm near Fairmount, Indiana, the daughter of a Quaker minister. She studied at Earlham College, the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, the Art Students League in New York under John Twachtman, H. Siddons Mowbray, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Boston Museum School, and with Howard Pyle in Wilmington, Delaware, a training of unusual breadth for a woman of her generation. She supported herself in New York in the 1890s and 1900s as a staff illustrator for the New York Tribune.
Her first visit to Santa Fe came in 1914, when she became the first woman to be given a solo exhibition at the Museum of New Mexico's Palace of the Governors. She moved permanently to Santa Fe in 1920, purchased an old adobe farmhouse on Canyon Road that would remain her home and studio for the next forty-six years, and became one of the central figures of the city's art community, frequently described as Santa Fe's "First Lady of the Arts." Her painting evolved from an early Impressionist-derived realism toward a fully modernist idiom by the end of her career, and her best-known easel painting, Girl on Turquoise Horse, was acquired by Lou Hoover, the wife of President Herbert Hoover. Her work as a WPA-era muralist and as an early developer of "true" fresco technique extended her practice into public spaces, including frescoes for New Mexico State University's Foster Hall Biology Building and the still-extant mural at Maisel's Trading Post in Albuquerque.