Ruth (Ewart) Muehlmeier

The Gallery Seeks Early Artwork by Ruth (Ewart) Muehlmeier​. Contact us: info@GalleryofWisconsinArt.com

BORN: 1925 in Wauwatosa, WI

DIED: 2019

Ruth Ewart was born in 1925 in Wauwatosa, WI and grew up loving art and drawing. She graduated from Wauwatosa West High School. She attended Wisconsin State Teachers College (now UW Milwaukee) and the Oxbow Summer School of Art in Saugatuck MI.  Her art education continued at the Chicago Art Institute, graduating in 1948.

In the late 1940s she studied Mayan and primitive art in Mexico and Yucatan. She spent a year as a free-lancing textile designer in New York City and attended classes in colored woodcut at the New School for Social Research under Louis Schanker. In Milwaukee, she taught children’s summer art classes at the Milwaukee Art Institute (now MAM), and art history, drawing and painting at Cardinal Stritch College. She became an accomplished fine artist and art historian, working and showing her work in New York and painting murals in the Wauwatosa area.  She was prolific with clay, paints and fabric as well as pencil and pen. Her compositions ranged from realism to abstract representation.

In 1951, she married Peyton Muehlmeier and started a family.   

She was active in the Milwaukee art community and taught Art History for 18 years (1960s and 1970s) at Layton School of Art (now MIAD) and Marquette University from the late 50s - early 70s.  Ruth was president of Wisconsin Painter's & Sculptors (now WVA) for many years and was the organizations archivist until the late 80s.  Ruth was awarded lifetime membership in WVA for her service to the organization in the 60's, 70's, 80's & 90's. 

Ruth's work created in the late 40s through 50s has a timeless quality and is some of her best. She always found time to develop work to show and sell at the annual Lakefront Art Fair and around southern Wisconsin. Ruth Ewart Muehlmeier usually signs her work REM. REM maintained studios in Brookfield (mid 1950s-1970), Oconomowoc (1970-2010) and Jupiter, FL where she spent most of the winters after retiring from teaching. Her work spans a range of genres, from abstract still life, landscapes and inventive figurative paintings in the late1940s and 50s, palm reading hands and line abstractions in 60s and 70s, ceramic figures and grand representational still life watercolor and acrylic paintings in the 80s and 90s. 

Ruth and Peyton moved from their Brookfield home of 16 years to ‘Wildwood’ on Upper Nemahbin Lake in 1971, where they lived for over 40 years.  Ruth maintained a large studio in the Wildwood basement, where she did large acrylic and watercolor still life paintings, and ceramics. It was her  “happy place” and she would often spend many hours working.

Ruth E. Muehlmeier, passed away at the age of 93.