Three Announcements for Katherine Ball's Slideshow Lectures on Japanese Art.

BALL, Katherine M.

Published by (Katherine M. Ball) [ca. 1908], San Francisco, 1908

About this Item

Three printed announcement for lecture and slideshow presented by Santa Barbara native Katherine M. Bell. All folded and of various sizes. Very good. No flaws worth mentioning.Katherine Ball (1859-1952) was born in Reading, PA. She studied in New York at the Cooper Union Art School, Cooper School of Design. She taught drawing and writing in the public schools of Omaha for seven years from 1888 and, while there, was elected the first secretary of the Western Art Association. In 1895 she settled in San Francisco and for 30 years was an art supervisor in the public schools until she retired in 1924. Due to a broken hip in 1941, she was bedridden until her death in San Francisco on March 13, 1952. Katherine Ball was one of the founders of the Japan Society of America. She was an avid collector of Japanese prints and art and lectured extensively in San Francisco and the west at the turn of the 20th century. She made many trips to the Orient and was also popular as a lecturer on Japanese prints. She also wrote 4 books on Japanese art: Animal motifs in Asian Art; Paper Folding and Cutting; a Series of Foldings and Cuttings Especially Adapted to Kindergartens and Public Schools; Decorative Motives in Oriental Art; Bamboo, Its Cult and Culture: Paintings by Wang Tseng-Tsu. Her work on Origami was surely one of the first how-to's published in America. At the turn of the century things Japanese were all the rage, in both high art circles and academia. K. M. Bell became quite an expert in ukiyo-e (woodblocks) and many other Japanese arts very early. At least expert expert enough to travel the world presenting her talks. One of the included flyers is for a lecture series she gave at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The other two are for lectures in San Francisco. The fact that she was viewed as a real expert as early as around 1910 can be seen in the list of Patronesses at the bottom of the Tokyo flyer. Of the fourteen Patronesses six were Japanese. Seller Inventory # 75627

Bibliographic Details

Title: Three Announcements for Katherine Ball's ...

Publisher: (Katherine M. Ball) [ca. 1908], San Francisco

Publication Date: 1908