MARIAN SPORE BUSH

b. 1878, Bay City, Bay, Michigan
d. 1946, New York, NY

 

WORKS   |   BIOGRAPHY   |   EXHIBITIONS   |   PUBLICATIONS

SELECTED WORKS

BIOGRAPHY

 

Marian Spore Bush (born Flora May Spore) became the first female dentist in Bay County when she opened a dental practice in Bay City in 1901. After the death of her mother in 1919, her life plan changed radically. She gave up her dental practice and went to the Pacific Island of Guam, where her brother was governor general, for six months. Out of an irresistible impulse, she began painting there for the first time, although she had never had the slightest inclination toward art. She believed that her painting was inspired and her art guided by long-dead artists who communicated with her from "beyond the veil" and were perhaps originally introduced to her by the spirit of her deceased mother.

Upon her return, she settled in New York City and rented a studio in Greenwich Village. Because of her paranormal experiences, she became involved early on in extrasensory perception experiments in collaboration with Dr. Walter Franklin Prince of the Boston Society for Psychical Research.

In a book published posthumously, she describes how forces not under her control, which she referred to only as "They," took control of her arm and brushes and put these images on canvas. She developed an extraordinary impasto technique, applying paint so thickly that it gave the effect of relief.

For years, she ran a soup kitchen for thousands of poor and needy people in New York's Bowery neighborhood. In 1930 she married industrial magnate Irving T. Bush, founder and president of the Bush Terminal Company in New York City. This opened up the possibility for her to exhibit her paintings in major galleries without ever selling them.

SELECTED EXHBITIONS

2019 The Medium’s Medium, Gallery of Everything, London, UK
1947 Memorial Exhibition, Grand Central Fifth Avenue Galleries, New York, NY, USA
1943 New York, NY, USA
1938 Grand Central Fifth Avenue Galleries, New York, NY, USA
1923 International Spiritualist Convention, Liège, Belgium
1922 Anderson Galleries, New York, NY, USA

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Bush, Marian Spore. They. New York: Beechhurst Press, 1947.