Neil Barrett

Neil Barrett was born in Milwaukee, WI in 1915. Her given name was Nancy, but early on, she adopted the pen name of Neil. She studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts/Parsons School of Design in the late 1930s into the early 1940s. She studied with such Chicago artists as Briggs Dyer, Joyce Treiman, George Cohen and Leon Golub. For a time, Barrett worked as a commercial designer in Chicago and began painting in 1952. She had her first solo exhibition in 1954. She exhibited with the prominent, Institute of Design-affiliated, Baldwin-Kingery Gallery in Chicago. She also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Butler Art Institute, Youngtown, OH and the Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL, among others. She was the president of the Women’s Board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from 1972-1979. In 1996, she died at the age of 81 in Winnetka, IL.