Jean RICHARDSON

Original etching

Hand-signed in pencil. Dated (19)89. Titled “Duet”.

Numbered in pencil, edition of 100.

Image size (without margins): 45 x 30 cm
Sheet size (with margins): 59 x 43 cm

Jean Richardson (born 1940 in Hollis, Oklahoma) is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, renowned for her large abstract canvases in which the horse becomes a powerful metaphor for the human spirit. Educated at Wesleyan College (B.F.A., 1962) and later at the Art Students League in New York, she first lived and worked in the American South before settling permanently in Oklahoma. Her career has taken her into major museums, galleries, and collections across the United States, where her work continues to resonate with lyrical energy and spiritual depth.

Biography of Jean Richardson

Early Life and Education

Jean Richardson was born in Hollis, Oklahoma, in 1940. When her father was drafted during World War II, her mother moved the family to San Antonio, Texas, where Jean began her first art classes at the Witte Museum at the age of seven. A few years later, the family relocated to Columbia, South Carolina.

After high school, she received an art scholarship that allowed her to study at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, where she earned a B.F.A. in 1962. During her studies, she was influenced by two professors connected to the Robert Henri school: Lamar Dodd and Lucille Blanch, the latter closely associated with Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

In the late 1970s, she pursued further studies at the Art Students League in New York.

Personal Life and Return to Oklahoma

At age 21, Jean married and settled in the South, living in Georgia and Alabama, where she taught art while raising her children. In the 1970s, she returned to Oklahoma and established her studio in Oklahoma City.

Artistic Career and Exhibitions

Jean Richardson’s career has been marked by a sustained exploration between abstraction and representation. Her early series, such as Oklahoma Album, drew inspiration from historical photographs layered over abstract backgrounds. She also produced a series of abstract landscapes inspired by Oklahoma’s red dirt roads.

She later developed the Plains Myth series, in which silhouettes of riders stand out against vivid skies, inspired by the photographs of Edward Curtis.

Her work has been exhibited in prestigious venues including the National Academy of Design, the Minnesota Museum of Art, the Gilcrease Museum, and the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa. She has also held solo exhibitions at the John Szoke Gallery (New York), Merrill-Chase Galleries (Washington, D.C. and Chicago), Cogswell Gallery (Vail, CO), Kneeland Gallery (Sun Valley, ID), Ventana Gallery (Santa Fe, NM), Royce Meyers Gallery (Tulsa), and the Governor’s Gallery at the Oklahoma State Capitol.

Collections and Honors

Richardson’s works are included in numerous corporate and public collections, such as: the Bank of Santa Fe, University of Oklahoma College of Law, Southwestern Bell, Marriott Hotels, AT&T, Yellow Freight, Raymond James, Dean A. McGee Eye Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Tupperware Corporation, Texas Christian University, University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, Oklahoma City University School of Law, and the Oklahoma State Art Collection.

She is also listed in Who’s Who in American Art and Who’s Who in the South and Southwest.

Style, Themes, and Critical Reception

Richardson’s painting style blends lyrical abstraction and symbolism. Her abstract horses, materialized in sweeping knife strokes and washes of pigment, embody the unbridled energy of the horse as a metaphor for the human spirit: unbridled, striving, sometimes heroic.

Critics have described her art as a dynamic tension between destruction and creation, with gestures approaching subconscious automatism, suspended between form and content.

Her work was also featured on public television (OETA, Gallery series, 2009), and she has been the subject of two publications: Turning Toward Home: The Art of Jean Richardson by Joan Carpenter Troccoli (1998), and the exhibition catalogue Plains Myths and Other Tales (1988).

As recently as August 2024, an interview described her as an important artist still active.

In addition to serving two terms with the Oklahoma Arts Council to promote visual arts for children, she offers this enduring advice to young artists:
“Do what you love, keep your gumption… don’t let anyone crowd you out.”