Margaretta Gilboy

I was born in 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to James Anthony Gilboy, a writer, and Ida Rae Reisbord, a bookkeeper. I attended Henry C. Lea Elementary School where I was encouraged in my love of art by Miss McGlauglin who suggested I take Saturday classes at the Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial. In 8th grade I was accepted into the Philadelphia High School for Girls where I majored in fine arts mentored by Gladys Bloch and Ephraim Weinberg. I was the art editor of the Milestone, our yearbook. Upon graduation I was awarded a Board of Education scholarship to attend the Philadelphia College of Art, from 1961-1965, majoring in painting. In 1964 I married Lester Goldstein. In 1966 after I graduated we moved to Denver, Colorado for a year. We returned to Philadelphia for a year and in 1967 moved to Boulder, Colorado where my husband was a professor in MCD Biology. In 1968 our daughter Natasha was born and in 1973 our daughter Nina. In 1977 I had my first solo exhibit at the I. Magnin Gallery in Denver. In 1979 I enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I first began teaching art. In 1981 our marriage ended. I remained in Colorado until 1983 when I returned to Philadelphia, teaching as an adjunct at Phila. College of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy where I taught for ten years. There I exhibited with the Locks Gallery and FAN Gallery. In 1987 I married Frank J. Zadlo. In 2002, upon the end of that union, I returned to Colorado where my daughters and their families live. I began teaching at the Art Students League, Denver. My work is represented by Goodwin Fine Art in Denver.

All my life I have been encouraged by my teachers, finding reassurance and strength in their confidence in me. I have been driven to express myself through art and ambitious for recognition since I was in elementary school. My mother, Ida Rae Reisbord Gilboy, a bookkeeper and passionate pianist, nurtured that artist in me. She gave me and my sister, the artist Elizabeth Bloom, a strong base from which to tackle the world and a passionate love for nature and beauty. It was my father, James A. Gilboy, who provided the spark for my creative identity. He was a talented writer and autodidact who wrote history in the WPA and was later a technical writer for the US Signal Corps. He did translations from the French for medical journals and read Heidegger in German. The solitary pleasures available to an artist I learned from him.

In terms of a broader sense of the reality of being a woman artist I was naive and needed being invited to join Colorado’s Front Range: Women in the Visual Arts in the 1970’s to fully understand the issues and obstacles facing us.. Front Range started as a feminist reaction to the deplorable lack of female role models in the art department of the University of Colorado and in all the country’s universities. We were lacking female role models and mentors and with little possibility of being hired to teach at college level as a way of supporting ourselves as artists and mentoring others. By the 1970’s I was painting every day and raising my two daughters, Natasha and Nina, and was supported financially by my husband, Lester Goldstein, a professor of biology. I was sheltered and isolated from a lot of the issues facing us as women. In Front Range I found out about the politics of art and the importance of strength in numbers. We exhibited together, encouraged each other personally and professionally and formed lasting supportive relationships which are active to this day. As part of a broad wave of change we saw improvements for parity, but with a long way still to go, even today.

Being included in the Brooklyn Museum’s Feminist Art Base, because of its positive recognition of these past and ongoing struggles for equality for women artists is meaningful to me. That the Brooklyn Museum is devoting resources to this quest for parity is thrilling.