Elmer Schooley

Art Brokerage: Elmer W. "Skinny" Schooley American Artist: b. 1916-2007. Elmer W. "Skinny" Schooley was born in Lawrence, Kansas, the third of four sons of Sparks and Nella Winey Schooley. His family lived in Oklahoma during his childhood, moving to Colorado during the Great Depression. After high school Schooley enrolled in the University of Colorado, where he majored in art and worked his way through college as a truck driver. In Boulder he fell in love with a fellow art major, Gertrude "Gussie" Rogers, and spent one summer as a ranch hand working on her family's ranch near Westcliffe, CO. They married in September of 1941, just prior to departing for the University of Iowa where they both earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree. In 1947 Schooley joined the Art Department of New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, NM. taught classes in all the above media, in addition to art history. He was head of the Art Department for many years before retiring early in 1978 to devote himself full time to painting. Both Schooley and his wife Gussie were predominantly landscape painters, for which they were well known. Schooley exhibited extensively, and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, the Roswell Museum and Art Center, the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, the Albuquerque Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, among others, and numerous private collections.