Zulma Steele

Artist/Craftswoman

Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Bard College

This is the first retrospective exhibition and the first publication devoted to Zulma Steele, a multitalented artist who made art in many media over a long career. She worked as a serious painter and printmaker, as well as in many crafts, including furniture design, ceramics, textiles, and frame making. Over her career Steele was a world traveler and a central figure in the art colony of Woodstock, New York, where she lived for most of her life. To those who knew her she was elegant and reticent. Indeed, she left little autobiographical information and few written records, so her story must be stitched together from bits and pieces—and from the insights afforded by her art.

Zulma Steele came from an illustrious family, who played a large role in her life. Her maternal ancestors, the Dorrs, were active in the China trade and intermarried with the Ripleys of Vermont, who were descended in part from eighteenth–century French colonists of Haiti. Steele’s middle name was Ripley. Ancestors on her paternal side included the Livingstons, who owned vast properties in New York. During the late nineteenth-century “rent wars” in that state, the Dorrs sided with the tenants against the lordly Livingstons. “It is interesting that on Father’s side there were the Livingstons and on Mother’s side the Down Renters,” Steele wrote to a relative.1

Steele’s immediate family was artistic, including her grandmother, Julia Dorr, a poet, and her mother, Zulma

DeLacy Steele, an artist who specialized in landscape painting. Her brother, Frederick Dorr Steele, was a successful illustrator, today most famous for popularizing the classic image of the detective Sherlock Holmes, with his Meerschaum pipe and deerstalker hat, in illustrations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s mystery stories.

Zulma was born in 1881 in Wisconsin, month and day unrecorded. When she was seven, her family moved to Vermont and then to New York. At nineteen she began art classes at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and studied as well at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Boston Museum School. She received her degree from Pratt in 1903, having worked most extensively with the influential artist and teacher Arthur Wesley Dow, known for his sensitive landscape paintings and for being among the early popularizers of Japanese aesthetics in the United States. In Dow’s class, she met fellow student Edna Walker, who would be her companion for close to twenty years. At Pratt, Steele and Walker became acquainted with the artist Bolton Brown, who was then in the process of establishing the Byrdcliffe arts and crafts colony in Woodstock. He invited them there as scholarship artists, introducing Steele to the region of upstate New York that would be her home for the rest of her active life.

Brown was one of the founders of Byrdcliffe, along with the bohemian poet Hervey White, both of whom had been hired by Englishman Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, who sponsored the colony and bankrolled it.2 Scion of a family that ran profitable textile mills in Staffordshire, Whitehead studied at Oxford with the brilliant philosopher of the Arts and Crafts movement John Ruskin, who hated England’s industrial revolution and its polluting, dehumanizing factories—the very source of the Whitehead family wealth. Whitehead married Jane Byrd McCall, an artist from Philadelphia, and moved to the United States, where he put his inherited fortune to work in an attempt to realize Ruskin’s ideal of a colony where both fine art and crafts would be practiced by a community of kindred spirits. Ruskin recommended that this should happen in some beautiful natural setting distant from the crowded and befouled big cities. In 1902, with the assistance of Brown and White, Whitehead purchased around 1200 acres on the side of a mountain overlooking the village of Woodstock, where he erected thirty buildings, and invited artists and craftspeople to live and work in them. Steele and Walker were among his first scholarship students, and they designed much of the distinctive Arts and Crafts furniture that was manufactured at the colony.

Byrdcliffe furniture, discussed in greater detail in Derin Tanyol’s essay in this publication, was supposed to support the colony through sales. But because Byrdcliffe adhered to Arts and Crafts values opposed to machine production, the furniture was labor-intensive and expensive to produce. It could not compete commercially with the less costly pieces manufactured, with the aid of machinery, by rival enterprises such as Stickley and Roycroft. Consequently, Byrdcliffe furniture is rare and much sought-after today.

Most of it was designed by Steele and Walker and overseen by Whitehead, who had apprenticed with a carpenter in Germany for a year before coming to the United States. The furniture is classic Arts and Crafts, made of local wood, its grain exposed to express its origins in nature (figs. 1 and 2). The contours are austere and rectilinear, in homage to the Arts and Crafts ideals of simplicity and truth-to-materials. Flat wooden panels are complemented by bursts of decorative imagery, usually drawn by Steele and Walker. While she was in England, Jane Whitehead had sketched plants side by side with Ruskin, and Whitehead personally knew William Morris, the other great representative of the Arts and Crafts in England. Both Whiteheads, then, provided direct connections to the origins of the movement. Steele and Walker followed Ruskin’s and Dow’s precepts, sketching plants from nature in delicately precise botanical drawings. They transformed these drawings into designs for the rectilinear panels of the furniture, which were next traced onto the wood panels, and then carved in relief by Byrdcliffe’s woodworkers. Finally the panels were stained in delicate tints that complemented the warm colors of the surrounding wooden rectangles (figs. 3 and 4).3

The first painting teacher at Byrdcliffe, Hermann Dudley Murphy, started an influential frame-making business in Boston, Carrig-Rohane, and Steele and Walker learned the craft from him.4 Steele later said, “The frame making we had at Byrdcliffe was the only craft we had that paid a profit.”5 A drawing for two mirror frames carries the names of both Steele and Walker. Within the narrow bands of the frame parallel straight lines are contrasted with passages of curvilinear botanical ornament (fig. 5). They also designed textiles. Steele’s drawing for a wallpaper pattern or a fabric reveals a sinuous quality that is more Art Nouveau than William Morris (fig. 6). In 1907 Steele exhibited a kimono with an oat pattern and a screen ornamented with flowers at the Society of Arts and Crafts exhibition in Boston, in the company of works by several other Byrdcliffe craftspeople.6

Steele embodied the Arts and Crafts ideal that crafts are equal in status to the fine arts. She likely designed the house Whitehead built for her and Walker, which still stands on Byrdcliffe property. All Byrdcliffe houses had names, which sometimes were the product of long discussions. The Steele-Walker house was “Angelus.”

A quick drawing in one of Steele’s sketchbooks depicting a woman, probably Walker, reading on a built-in bench, conveys the relaxed domesticity and intimacy with nature that characterized the two women’s lives at Byrdcliffe (fig. 7). While Angelus was being built, Steele lived with veteran painter Birge Harrison and his wife, the Whiteheads having brought Harrison to Byrdcliffe as a painting instructor. Harrison, who spent years in France and who had lived in French art colonies, was a highly accomplished landscape painter in the Tonalist mode, a style derived from Impressionism but favoring more restrained colors that convey moods of reverie and nostalgia. Steele became a close friend of the Harrisons and studied painting with the respected teacher.

Like her mother, Steele painted landscapes, and she was one of the first women to ambitiously practice landscape painting. Landscape was one of the era’s most progressive subjects for art, and in 1906 the Art Students League in New York City created a summer school in Woodstock devoted to it, with Harrison as its instructor.

Steele’s early ventures into landscape resulted in vistas with delicately muted tonalities reflecting her mentor’s style. Summer , a hazy landscape from 1904, features a compositional strategy to which Steele returned repeatedly over the course of her career: a diagonal wedge of land introduces the foreground, serving as a repoussoir for succeeding layers that recede into a misty distance (fig. 8). The foreground is inhabited by four relaxed figures, a young man facing three reclining women in long white dresses. This mirrors the gender imbalance at Byrdcliffe, where many of the artists and craftspeople for whom Whitehead generously provided living and working spaces were young women looking to break with stereotypes and become independent practitioners of their art. Whitehead had originally been introduced to his collaborator, Hervey White, by the renowned feminist writer (“The Yellow Wallpaper”), Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman was an early resident and frequent guest at the colony, as were other women with independent minds and artistic aspirations.

Soon, Steele began to brighten the muted, evocative palette she had used in Summer and her paint handling became more aggressive. This reflected the progressive movements prevalent at the time and evident at Woodstock’s own Sunflower Club, which included modernist (and Harrison student) Andrew Dasburg, who in the early 1910s experimented with Cubism and—briefly—total abstraction. Such Steele paintings as Untitled (Neo-Impressionist Landscape) depict deep Hudson River Valley vistas rendered with thick dabs of bright color, suggesting an aggressive version of late nineteenth century French Pointillism (fig. 9). The painting is another example of Steele’s use of repoussoir, here in the compositional device of angling a plane into the canvas from the edge to establish a foreground beyond which the rest of the landscape moves into space.

The construction of the Ashokan Reservoir in the mid-1910s inspired Steele’s most ambitious series of landscape paintings, more extensively discussed by Bruce Weber in his essay in this publication (figs. 10 and 11). These expansive views, with glistening bodies of water leading to glowing distant mountains, represent a modern evolution from nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings, descending from that movement’s founder, Thomas Cole, which often included peaceful bodies of water. Steele’s deep vistas, however, featuring her newly liberated use of color, have as their subject not nature’s splendor, but a work of human technology, a reservoir. The building of this vast artificial lake, constructed to supply water to New York City almost a hundred miles to the south, displaced some two thousand residents in the process of being built. Steele’s luminous scenes document the filling of the reservoir with water but avoid any attendant social issues.

In the mid-1910s, Steele exhibited her paintings frequently. It was not unusual for Woodstock artists to have residences in New York City as well as upstate—proximity to the metropolis was an argument for choosing Woodstock as the site for Byrdcliffe in the first place—and several Manhattan addresses have been found for Steele and Walker.7

In 1914 Steele showed in an exhibition at the National Arts Club, which included many of the most avant-garde artists in the United States at the time. She also exhibited twice that year at the progressive MacDowell Club, showing her Ashokan paintings in March, after exhibiting five landscape paintings there in January in a show of twelve women artists. Participating in a show of all women artists was typical for her. An active member of the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, in 1915 she showed two landscape paintings at the Macbeth Gallery in an exhibition of works by ninety-nine women artists to benefit women’s suffrage, taking her stand for women’s right to vote.

In 1915 some of her works were exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Steele loved to travel, mostly during the winters to places with warmer climates, including Italy, the Bahamas, and Puerto Rico. Ireland was another of her destinations. The paintings that came after the Ashokan series rarely approached these works in size and grandeur, but she continued her interest in landscape subjects by making small, loosely painted but nevertheless specific landscape views. These included Woodstock scenes, some thickly painted snowscapes among them (fig. 12). Steele stayed with an aunt in Italy in 1912.8 A view of a rural Italian town, painted on canvas board, includes poplars at the right that establish the foreground, while dabs of paint represent white buildings with their orange roofs in the valley below, in front of a range of pale blue mountains in the background (fig. 13).

Around this time Steele drew a striking self-portrait in line. She contemplatively rests her head on her hand, most likely regarding herself in a mirror (fig. 14). It is an image of self-appraisal, suggesting a mature self-knowledge, in contrast to her mysterious Tonalist Self-Portrait, from 1901, when she was studying with Dow (fig.15). In that earlier work, she is seen in three-quarter view, all but engulfed by the shadows that surround her on all sides as a few areas of dim light bring her features out of the moody darkness.

In the later 1910s Steele exercised her passion for landscape in a medium new to her, monotype, in which a one-of-a-kind work is painted on a hard surface and then run through a press to print the image on a piece of paper. She made a series of small radiant landscapes, the white paper she used providing their luminosity. Some were memories of her winter travels, such as the horizontal composition of palm trees in front of a calm body of water, with a verdant band of greenery at the bottom (fig. 16). Another favored theme was mountains rising into the sky above the terrain below (fig. 17). The small sizes of these prints contrast with the grandeur of the scenes depicted, as barren mountainsides provide fields for plays of delicate color. A tiny but especially glowing monotype of a slender coastline at sunset, mirrored in placid water, puts Steele among some “realist” painters of the time who presented easily recognizable scenes as flat color fields, approaching abstraction (fig. 18). The tendency is found in some of Birge Harrison’s paintings as well. Steele also made monochrome monotypes in warm browns or blacks, including a view of White Pines, the residence of the Whiteheads, which still presides over the Byrdcliffe landscape today (fig. 19). This is one of her rare dated works, from 1916. Steele made her monotypes a few years after the New York Armory Show of 1913, which introduced the American art public to radical European modernism. In 1918 she published an unusual linoleum print in The Plowshare magazine, which demonstrates her emerging interest in abstraction (fig. 20). The Plowshare was founded and printed by Hervey White who, soon tiring of life under Whitehead’s rule at Byrdcliffe, left, managed to buy a mountainside just outside of Woodstock proper, and there created his own art colony. “The Maverick,” aptly named, was a low-budget alternative to Whitehead’s more refined community.9 Steele’s appearance in a Maverick publication is an example of how social lines in the Woodstock art community interpenetrated despite differing lifestyles. Another example of this was the founding of the Woodstock Artists Association in 1919, which again brought together various factions of Woodstock’s artistic community in a common purpose; Steele was a charter member. In 1939 she went on to become the first president of the Woodstock Guild of Craftsmen, which in 1975 inherited Byrdcliffe from Whitehead’s son, Peter, and is the organization hosting this exhibition.

Steele’s linoleum print in The Plowshare suffered the fate of quite a few examples of early experiments in abstraction—and some current ones as well It was reproduced sideways, as is made evident by her monogram in the lower right corner. A dramatic blackand-white composition of pointed, curving shapes, it introduces White’s novel, The Prodigal Father , a story about a young clergyman whose father abandoned him at an early age, only to return to the town where the son was beginning to practice his ministry. One of White’s most compelling pieces of writing, based on the Woodstock scene and the tensions between the older residents and the artist newcomers, it exists only in serial, as chapters in the magazine, and has never been republished. When Steele’s print is correctly oriented, as it is here, its relevance to White’s story becomes clear. The artist created an abstracted version of traditional depictions of the biblical subject of The Prodigal Son, with a figure near the center kneeling and bowing in repentance to another figure seated higher up to the left. This near-abstraction, with figures almost obscured by pure forms but recognizable after closer examination, is a type of imagery to which the artist returned later in her career.

In 1918 Zulma Steele boldly left the United States to serve with the American Red Cross in France during the final year of World War I; a photograph shows her standing proudly upright in her uniform (fig. 21). As Tad Wise discovered, Edna Walker also served with the Red Cross in France at the same time.10 After working for a year in a hospital, and with the Armistice having ended, Steele obtained permission to visit artillery-ravaged Verdun, where she made small paintings on the backs of cigar boxes, none of which have been located.11

After she returned to the United States, Steele embarked on a new artistic pursuit, ceramics. Sketchbooks in the collection of her descendants show that she studied traditional pottery by making drawings of vessels from sources that include ancient Egypt, Persia, and the Italian Renaissance. She developed her own unusual forms, favoring warm yellow or brown glazes, or bright blue ones. One simple brown bowl is enlivened by a thick scrolling floriate design around the rim, echoing the decorative botanical patterns she and Walker made for Byrdcliffe furniture (fig. 22). A turquoise urn is dramatically suspended on three pretzel-shaped feet turned upright, while a small turquoise double-handled cup is enlivened with a dark blue glaze dripping down from its rim, reminiscent of the painterly glazes found in some East Asian ceramics (figs. 23 and 24). In 1922, she showed her ceramics at the Woodstock Artists Association, along with her paintings.12 She made these pots at Byrdcliffe, continuing the ceramic tradition previously practiced there by Elizabeth Hardenburgh and Edith Penman, another Byrdcliffe craftswomen couple, who stopped making the ceramics they called “Byrdcliffe Pottery” in 1922 or 1923. Subsequently, Steele took over their facilities; a photograph shows her working on a kick wheel there (fig. 25). About this time she also moved out of Angelus to a house just west of Byrdcliffe. Little is known about the circumstances surrounding her move.

Steele named her ceramics Zedware, which Tad Wise ingeniously suggests merges her first name with Walker’s.13 There has been speculation about the relationship between Steele and Walker, recently spurred by Wise’s two-part article about Steele in the Woodstock Times in which he describes their “life-long love affair” and claims Steele was bisexual.14 There is no doubt that Steele and Walker were close, living together for almost twenty years. A quick drawing in one of Steele’s sketchbooks is a testament to their connectedness. It depicts two women from the back, carrying four suitcases, two each, one monogrammed “ZS” and the other “EMW,” as if their identities were interchangeable (fig. 26). A photograph in a family album depicts the two women seated on steps of a house with Steele’s mother and father standing above them, indicating that their relationship was accepted, at least on some level, by her parents.15

Anita Smith, who wrote the first history of Woodstock, included an anecdote in which Rosie McGee, a local caretaker who had a habit of watching her neighbors through a spyglass, was surprised to see Zulma Steele in the company of a man—but when she walked up to investigate “she found the man was Edna Walker working in pants.”16 There was quite a bit of tolerance for gender fluidity among the artists of the colony, and many people believed that Steele had a romantic relationship with her patron, Ralph Whitehead. In an angry letter, Jane Whitehead wrote to her husband, “I found the situation at home all summer disagreeable, and at last I came away and left it.… Do you remember that you and Miss Steele had given rise to talk all summer, and no one had said a word.”17 Historian Alf Evers recalled that when he interviewed Steele, “she was very noticeably shy about Ralph Whitehead.”18 Then, in 1926, Zulma Steele married Neilson Parker, a gentleman farmer who was wealthy from his insurance business. Earlier Jane Whitehead commented cattily in a letter to her son, “By the way, that old duffer, Ne[i]lson Parker, you remember—he’s very attentive to Miss Steele. I do hope she’ll be his 3rd wife.”19

Since the early 1910s Walker had practiced her talents at textile design by working for the prestigious Herter Looms in New York City. Many believed that when Zulma married, Edna Walker moved away and was never heard from again, but Alf Evers claimed that she married a Scotsman and moved to Scotland.20 In any case, forty-five-year-old Steele went from bride to widow in just two years, as Parker passed away in 1928, leaving her with the house they named “Green Pastures” on a large estate that years before had been owned by her Livingston ancestors.21

After she was widowed Steele resumed her travels. Some years after her Red Cross experience in France she returned to Paris, where she studied with the progressive Cubist painter André L’Hote. The experience encouraged her to develop her painting in a more modernist direction. She also became increasingly interested in her genealogy, and while in Paris did research about the extensive cotton and indigo plantations in Haiti that the Ripley branch of her family owned in the eighteenth century. She made four or five trips to Haiti in the late 1940s and 1950s, seeking to identify her family’s properties, which were confiscated after the independence uprisings of the late eighteenth century. After she convinced the locals that she was not there to try to reclaim any real estate, they became hospitable, helping her travel through many parts of the country where she witnessed regional customs, including voodoo rites. These ceremonies probably inspired her intense small pastel drawing in her Cubist style (fig. 27) It is dominated by the head of a witch doc- tor, who emits light rays and is surrounded by an audience of fragmented heads and geometrical lines.

Another of Steele’s Haitian-themed paintings centers on a mother and child, a recurrent motif in her drawings over the years and a traditional image of female identity (fig. 28). Here an abstract curving line sweeps across the center of the composition, animating a scene of a mother multitasking: holding a baby while reaching into a bowl in a crowded outdoor marketplace, with a pile of yellow fruit below her. She is surrounded by dark-skinned figures. We could dismiss this work as a touristic or even colonialist painting—but how many women in their seventies were making paintings of Haitian street scenes?

In contrast to her anthropological or exoticist works inspired by rituals and marketplaces is a charming pastel of a fashionably dressed young dark-skinned woman in front of the window of a clothing store (fig. 29). The specifics of this composition are unknown, but the piece suggests an urban realist Manhattan 14th Street scene transposed to Haiti. Throughout her career, Steele sketched street life, in New York City as well as in foreign countries, few of these works titled or dated. She depicted milieus easily accessible to an urban wanderer, a flaneur, including outdoor market scenes, children playing in the street, and mothers with children. The subjects, whether in her early realist style or in her later abstracted mode, relate to the urban scene painters of the Ash Can

School and their followers. Here again Steele had a family connection. Her brother’s daughter married the son of painter Frederick Dana Marsh. Among his several residences was a house in Woodstock, and he was the father of Reginald Marsh, a leading figure among the urban realists. Steele knew both the father and the son.22

Another group of Steele’s paintings and works on paper appear totally abstract. Some retain the vestiges of imagery, while others are nonreferential. None of them is dated, so the only way to locate them within the arc of the artist’s career is through informed guesswork. Clearly, they come after her exposure to L’Hote, but whether they predate or postdate the Haitian paintings, or are contemporary with them, is at present unknown.

Steele addressed the issue of abstract art in her onepage biographical statement:

The experiences of war and some knowledge of other civilizations, of speed and air flight, have made earlier art expression less adequate. After all, if you really have been over the rainbow and looked down at the floor of the ocean, your point of view changes…23

A small work on paper with bright colors, scimitarlike forms, and free-floating lines seems completely abstract, but, in another, figures appear to be embedded, reminiscent of the Prodigal Father print from 1915 (figs. 30 and 31). A dynamic three-foot-wide painting on canvas looks like an elegant abstraction (fig. 32). But could this be a subliminal Leda and the Swan, the swan’s two white wings rising up to the right, and its long neck merging with the white body of a woman who reclines above it? Impossible to know at this point in our research, but it is a tantalizing prospect—typical of the mystery that characterizes much of Zulma Steele’s life and art.

Throughout her later years Steele continued to paint and to travel. In 1954 she converted a shed on her property into an art gallery where, at the end of the summer, she held what a newspaper at the time called “a one-man show.” 24 Four years later, in 1958, she worked with an art advisor to organize an exhibition of her paintings to travel to about a dozen libraries and college art galleries. The tour was interrupted by a fire in the library of St. Frances University, Loretto, Pennsylvania, which destroyed a group of her works. Undaunted, the artist set about making new paintings to replace them.

Her late years at Green Pastures were devoted to making her art, participating in the active art world of Woodstock, and enjoying her home. There she lived with her artworks and ample studio space, amid furnishings that included a set of Federal-style chairs, now in the Columbia County Historical Society, and three paintings of her Dorr ancestors attributed to the esteemed folk artist Ami Phillips, which are now in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center.25 In 1967, at age eighty-six, Steele moved into a nursing home in New Jersey, where she passed away in 1979.

Tram Coombs wrote of Zulma Steele, “Despite her long life in Woodstock, little is known about her….” 26

Bolton Brown remembered her from the first days at Byrdcliffe as “really our outstanding lady, both visually and in a quality we may call style.” 27 Alf Evers recounted,

I questioned her without getting very far…she was very unusual, had great dignity when she was old…and very erect, you know…she could have been a person on the upper levels of society…she took herself very seriously and everybody else took her very seriously…I would have tea with her, old-fashioned tea, and we would chat but when we would get to the past she would veer away…28

We hope this project brings some visibility to this bold and talented artist and her multi-faceted work, as we present the first exhibition and publication devoted to Zulma Steele.

Notes

1 Zulma Steele to Robert Steele, November 3, 1958, copy in the author’s collection. This publication is being written and produced during the period of lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic, so some specifics of research are unavailable as libraries and archives are closed.

2 For Byrdcliffe, see Nancy Greene ed., Byrdcliffe, An American Arts and Crafts Colony (Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2004).

3 Robert W. Lang, in his informative Shop Drawings for Byrdcliffe Furniture (Cincinnati: RWD Publishing, 2020), 25, persuasively suggests influences from Alvin Crocker Nye, who taught furniture making at Pratt while Steele and Walker studied there, and from Nye’s book, Furniture Designing and Draughting. Lang also points out that there was some machinery in the Bottega, Byrdcliffe’s woodworking shop, 24

4 Bertha Thompson, “The Craftsmen of Byrdcliffe,” Publications of the Woodstock Historical Society, no. 10 (July 1933), 10.

5 Edward Sanders, “Interview with Alf Evers,” Woodstock Journal (June 28, 1996). Thanks to Ed Sanders for sending me this reference.

6 Robert Edwards, The Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony: Life by Design (Delaware Art Museum, 1984).

7 The drawing of the frame includes the address 158 W. 23rd Street for the two of them. Other sources mention an address on Lexington Avenue, and 215 West 13th.

8 In a letter to his wife dated October 10, 1912, Ralph Whitehead wrote, “Miss Walker looks very ill and Miss Quinn and I are trying to persuade her to take the holiday which Herter has promised her to go to Italy in November and join Miss Steele who is staying with an aunt living there.” The suggestion may have succeeded because in a letter from May 9, 1914, he wrote, “Miss Thompson [a metal worker at Byrdcliffe] & Miss Walker & Miss Steele are here now. They have all been away for some time.” Winterthur Papers, Downs Collection, Folder 8, Box 2, Folder 1, Box 4.

9 For The Maverick, see Josephine Bloodgood and Tom Wolf, The Maverick: Hervey White’s Colony of the Arts with essays by William G. Rhoades and Tom Wolf (Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, 2006).

10 Tad Wise, “Gender Blending in Early Woodstock and Our First Female Genius,” Woodstock Times (August 26, 2018) and “Zulma Steele, Gender Blender Extraordinaire,” Woodstock Times (September 5, 2018), reproduces a photograph he discovered that seems to be of the two artists in the Red Cross, and there is a photograph of Walker with the Red Cross in France in 1920 in the Library of Congress. A Steele sketchbook in the collection of her family includes a series of portrait sketches that could well have been made on an ocean voyage, with several of the same muffled-up woman and one of a woman sleeping, all of which could be Walker.

11 Steele statement, n.d., copy in Archives, Woodstock Artists Association. This one-page, typed document is her only known autobiographical statement or resume. Zulma Steele files, Archives, Woodstock Artists Association.

12 Marinobel Smith, “At Woodstock,” described Steele’s ceramics at the Artists Association: “some in brilliant colors, some decorated with copper and silver glaze in Spanish patterns.” Unidentified newspaper clipping (August 1922), WAA clippings book, Woodstock Artists Association Archives.

13 Tad Wise, articles cited in note 10. When advertised at the time, Zedware pottery was described as “Made by Zulma Steele, Woodstock, New York.”

14 Tad Wise, articles cited in note 10. Wise’s articles contribute valuable insights and information to the story of Zulma Steele, but at times they are speculative. Several of his arguments are based on the tricky practice of identifying people in photographs that are over a hundred years old, and here he undermines his credibility by stating a photograph of Zulma and Edna seated facing each other at Angelus is misidentified—that the handwritten names below are wrong, and Zulma is actually Edna and vice versa. But he gives no evidence, and the photo is from a family album, so he is asking the reader to believe that he can recognize Zulma in a photograph more accurately than her own relatives could. The album was owned by the late family historian Robert Steele. According to Tom Hunt, a descendant of Zulma Steele, it is still with a family member in California, and Hunt also has photocopies of it. In the years around 1950 Steele traveled repeatedly to Caribbean islands. She made several pastel drawings of “native” women, and on occasion men, embracing, which suggests that her interest in same sex relationships was ongoing.

15 I discuss this album in note 14.

16 Anita Smith, Woodstock, History and Hearsay (Woodstock, NY: Woodstock Arts, 1959; reprint ed., 2006), 124.

17 Jane Whitehead, Letter to Ralph Whitehead, November 4, no year, Winterthur Papers, DownsCollection. Box 7.

18 Edward Sanders, “Interview with Alf Evers,” Woodstock Journal (June 28, 1996). My thanks to Ed Sanders for sending me this reference.

19 Jane Whitehead, Letter to Bim (Ralph Whitehead Jr.), July 11 and 13, 1924, Winterthur Papers, Downs Collection, Folder 11, Box 7.

20 Alf Evers interview with Tom Wolf, July 23, 2003.

21 Estimates about the extent of the property of the Green Pastures estate vary widely. Tram Coombs, in “Delicacies of Steele at the Paradox,” Woodstock Times (July 15, 1982), cites 300 acres, a figure that appears elsewhere. Tinker Twine in “Green Pastures No More,” Woodstock Times (November 16, 1989), writes 45 acres, but points out that “Much of the land borders a town-owned greenbelt along the Sawkill Creek at Big Deep which [Zulma] Parker had bequeathed to the town” (13).

22 Tom Hunt, the Steele relative who has been very helpful with this exhibition and essay, affirms that Zulma knew both Frederick and Reginald Marsh.

23 Steele statement (document cited in note 11) , n.d., copy in Archives, Woodstock Artists Association.

24 “Zulma Parker Has One-Man Show In Her Own Gallery,” unidentified newspaper clipping. WAA clippings book, Archives, Woodstock Artists Association.

25 My thanks to historian Ruth Piwonka for this information.

26 Tram Coombs, in “Delicacies of Steele at the Paradox,” Woodstock Times (July 15, 1982).

27 Bolton Brown, “Early Days at Woodstock,” Publications of the Woodstock Historical Society, XIII (August-September 1937), 13.

28 Beate Dumont, transcript of an interview with Alf Evers, February 17, 1995, part of her Senior Project in Art History at Bard College, collection of Tom Wolf.