Keywords

Mabel Frazer, gender and art, American West landscapes

Abstract

In 1949 the painter Mabel Frazer (1887–1981) applied for, and finally received, promotion to the position of associate professor of art at the University of Utah. Yet, after nearly three decades of diligent service, she witnessed her male peers, often with far fewer bona fides, receive advancement.1 This was the challenge, she acknowledged, of being a “woman in a man’s institution.”2 Throughout her career Frazer repeatedly overcame similar challenges and, by so doing, defied and redefined what it meant to be a female artist in Utah. This essay explores one of the significant ways in which Frazer’s work stretched gendered conventions. More specifically it focuses on her work in the rugged landscapes of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Working in the West during the 1920s and early 1930s, Frazer fought against the conventions of a woman’s place in the arts and the idea that landscape painting was “man’s work.”3 Ultimately, by challenging how a female artist could paint and where she could work, Frazer created an important, if largely forgotten, contribution to the representation of the American West (fig. 1).

Original Publication Citation

“A Tyrannical Grace: Mabel Frazer, the American West, and the Navigation of a Man’s Space,” Utah Historical Quarterly 91, no. 4 (Fall 2023): 302-314.