“ONE LOVELY THING about a garden is the way one’s friends enjoy it,” Olive Rush (1873–1966) once wrote to a fellow artist. On a recent evening in Santa Fe, a circle of young people seated under her fruit trees might have made her smile. They were there for A Way with Words, an event hosted by the Olive Rush Studio & Art Center for St. John’s College students to experience the garden through philosophical discussions, music, and poetry.
Visitors wound into the old adobe, which is still outfitted with Rush’s framed works, furniture, and art supplies. A woman lounging on the living-room window seat strummed a guitar and sang an original song. People spilled into the verdant backyard, relishing the shadows cast by the sunset.
The scene showcased the latest iteration of the more than 200-year-old house located in the heart of Santa Fe’s gallery district. This past spring, a group of extended Rush family members and supporters formally opened the Olive Rush Studio & Art Center there. Via a museum and programming that includes classes, exhibitions, talks, and concerts, the nonprofit aims to memorialize the legacy of the artist and teacher who lived there for more than four decades, helping to make Santa Fe the art capital of the Southwest.
The studio served as Olive Rush's artistic haven for decades.
Photograph courtesy of Olive Rush Studio.
“She was so intentional about carving out her own place,” says Liz Kohlenberg, Rush’s great-niece and board chair of the Olive Rush Memorial Studio. Kohlenberg notes several fresco paintings Rush made on the property, including the fancifully decorated fireplace. A nationally known painter, illustrator, muralist, and freelancer for outlets such as the Saturday Evening Post, who was often called “the dean of Santa Fe women artists,” Rush settled into the farmhouse in 1920 at the age of 47. There, she turned her art-filled abode into a must-visit fixture of the town’s lively artists’ colony. Her annual garden parties were a particular draw, where friends like artist Gustave Baumann delighted in spiking the punch.
“There’s a spiritual quality to that house,” Kohlenberg adds, “and that was something Olive wanted.” Rush regularly held Quaker gatherings at her residence; after her death, Religious Society of Friends meetings continued there for more than half a century before outgrowing the space. A hush still falls over visitors when they realize they’re standing in one of the only intact original artist studios left from Rush’s heady era. “There’s her easel right there,” says property manager Mara Saxer, who has overseen several preservation projects at the house. “And she painted that painting right in that spot.” Saxer opens a cabinet to show me an old notebook in which Rush jotted down ideas in a neat cursive.
The center’s first chapter involves reintroducing the property to the public via regular open houses and events, with the goal of garnering enough support to open a full-time studio museum. In the meantime, a regular watercolor class meets in the garden this fall, prompted by the changing beauty of the trees, plants, and flowers, and the long artistic legacy of the lady who planted them.
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