Bertha Landers

Bertha Mae Landers (1911–1996) was an American painter and printmaker.

A original of Winnsboro, Texas, where she was raised, Landers graduated from Sul Ross State Teachers College in 1931 following a bachelor's degree in art. She studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and at the Art Students League of New York, at the latter working below the support of Reginald Marsh. Further lessons occurred below Olin Travis at the Dallas Art Institute and taking into consideration Henry Varnum Poor and Arnold Blanch. Long employed by the Dallas Public Library, she founded its audiovisual department in 1942. She began to act out in California in the 1930s, while yet living in Dallas, and innovative settled in the state. In Escondido, in 1956, she founded Landers Film and Video Reviews; she died in San Diego.

Landers belonged to a number of artistic organizations during her career, including the Southern States Art League, Southern Printmakers, and the Texas Fine Arts Association; she was a charter supporter of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. In 1939 she was one of eight women who founded the Printmakers Guild, later called Texas Printmakers, to challenge the male-dominated Lone Star Printmakers; the others were Lucile Land Lacy, Stella Lamond, Mary Lightfoot, Verda Ligon, Blanche McVeigh, Coreen Mary Spellman, and Lura Ann Taylor. During her career, she exhibited widely in Texas and California, showing play-act at venues elsewhere in the United States as well. In 1940 she held a one-woman be active at the Dallas Museum of Art. That institution owns a gouache by her, Forgotten, as skillfully as an etching and aquatint, Market Day, and nine lithographs. Four more prints, the 1946 screenprint Ad Infinitum and three lithographs are owned by the National Gallery of Art; they are allocation of the donation made to the museum by Reba and Dave Williams of the Print Research Foundation in 2009. The 1914 lithograph Mexican Funeral is held by the Library of Congress. Works by Landers may as well as be found in the collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Texas.