Cora Kelley Ward

Cora Kelley Ward (1920–1989) was born in Eunice, Louisiana and lived through the New York City art movements of the 1960s to the 1980s, such as the Color Field Movement. Ward studied painting at the Newcomb Art School at Tulane University and vanguard earned a Master of Arts degree from Hunter College in New York City. Ward is known for her doing in Abstract Expressionism and her meticulous picture-taking of the New York art scene from the 1950s to the 1980s.

She studied below Josef Albers and Clement Greenberg, who became a lifelong buddy to Ward. At Black Mountain College she assistant professor the concepts of Modernism "through the teachings of European artists who taught at BMC and supplementary schools when they fled Hitler's 'purification' of German culture". In 1955 she moved to New York City and approved in Greenwich Village and continued to pursue her art. "Ward's feign was based on the second generation of Abstract Expressionism, ideologies which explored art at its most elemental core." She worked upon solutions to self-imposed challenges, amassing a large body of work. Ward is most remembered as a photographer by her contemporaries and fellow artists from this period. The shy Ward would attend events, camera in hand, where she captured the interaction and ruckus of the contemporary art world. In the exhibition held after her death in 1989, her longtime buddy Clement Greenberg wrote in the catalog, “Cora was a dear and humane friend. But I can confidently say that that doesn't sway me. It's only similar to these paintings of the eighties that I am skillful to hail her art without reservation. That makes me glad – regretfully hence because she’s not here to gate what I write.” Ward completed many works in her lifetime, but unfortunately she lonesome began to be recognized near the grow less of her life. Her family was left bearing in mind a big number of paintings and no one to accept them, so they ended in the works being donated to various museums and institutions, and complex on, anyone that would take them. A large ration of her estate, around a thousand paintings, was resolved as a gift to the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum of Louisiana by the heirs of the state. Ward died of what is believed to be cancer at age 69.