Shapes
Doris Williamson Mapes (1920-2013), Artist
Oil on Board
20th Century (Third or Fourth Quarter)
Given by the Artist
Doris Genevieve Williamson Mapes became one of Arkansas’ leading mid-twentieth-century artists. Adept in a variety of paint medium, she was best known as a watercolorist who used bold, bright colors with strong patterns and abstract designs. Mape’s style was described as imaginative realism.
Doris Williamson Mapes was born in Russellville, Arkansas in 1920. Her art career began at age 8 when, with a leaky pen, she won $10 in a drawing contest in the Denver Post. She attended Hendrix College, University of Arkansas at Little Rock and was certified by Rex Brandt School of Painting in California. She taught at Bella Vista Fine Arts Center, at Mississippi County Community College and for twenty years at Dansarts School. In 1970, along with four other artists, Mapes founded and incorporated the Mid-Southern Watercolorists. She was elected as the organization’s founding president.
Doris Mapes works have been shown in many prestigious places. She had three pieces selected in shows sponsored by U.S. Senator David Pryor. These pieces hung in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. After attending the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton, she painted one of her best-known pieces, Man from Hope, depicting the presidential oath of office ceremony.
Mapes’s paintings are held in more than 400 public and private collections. Two pieces, White River Cottage and Lakeside Lilies, both watercolor on paper, are in the permanent collection of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. During Bill Cinton’s presidency, Lakeside Lilies, one of Hillary Clinton’s favorite paintings was loaned to and displayed in the White House.
Mapes’s paintings have been jury selected in many national and regional exhibitions, including the American Watercolor Society Exhibition, the National League of American Pen Women art gallery, the Delta Art Exhibition, Southwestern Watercolor Society, Watercolor U.S.A., and the Mid-Southern Watercolorist Exhibition. Mapes has held more than forty solo shows throughout the country and has had her biography listed in Who’s Who in American Art, Women Artists in America, Artists U.S.A., Who’s Who of American Women, Revue des Beaus Arts, and Arkansas Lives.
In 2011, at the age of ninety-one, Mapes had two paintings juried into the Mid-Southern Watercolorists Fall Exhibition and that same year held one of her largest solo shows. Doris Mapes was a member of Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church and died in 2013.Doris Mapes was instrumental in the art instruction of Reita Walker Miller, another artist represented in the PHUMC collection.