Ostricart

Ellen Lanyon

Chicago printmaker Ellen Lanyon displays her exceptional drawing skills to create this fairly large lithograph of an ostrich and racing cart, done in a loose, expressionistic style. Ostrich racing has been going on for centuries and is a common practice in Africa. The powerful birds pull two or four-wheeled carts, or jockeys ride on their backs. The Chandler Ostrich Festival in Arizona has been an annual event for twenty-five years. Each Ostrich wears a canvas harness on its back to protect its feathers and give jockeys something to hold onto.

Ellen Lanyon was born on December 21, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended Hyde Park High School. Lanyon studied at the University of Chicago, and earned her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1948 when she married artist Roland Ginzel, and her MFA at the University of Iowa in 1950.

Lanyon's paintings, drawings and prints were hung in galleries and museums all over the world, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Krannert Museum, the McNay Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Brauer Museum. Three major retrospective exhibitions of her work were mounted. Her work was included in numerous group exhibitions and she had seventy-five solo gallery exhibitions.

Lanyon received several Armstrong Prize Awards and a Logan Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago, a Fulbright Study Grant, Cassandra Foundation Grant, Herewood Lester Cook Foundation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Awards, plus many others.

In the 1960s she managed Ox-Bow, an art school in Saugatuck, Michigan. She taught for almost forty years at universities and professional art schools and retired as an Associate Professor of Cooper Union in New York.

Ellen Lanyon died in New York on October 7, 2013.

The large flightless Ostrich is native to Africa and has a lifespan of thirty to forty years. It is the largest and heaviest living bird and the male can grow to a height of nine feet. The Ostrich has adapted to running to escape predators and its long, thick and powerful legs can cover great distances; they can sprint in short bursts up to forty-three miles per hour. One stride can be ten to fifteen feet long. They have cloven hoofs consisting of only two toes. When in danger and cannot run, the Ostrich can deliver a powerful kick. These large birds are nomadic, wandering where they find food; they eat various seeds, grasses, bushes and forage on trees. They have no teeth so they swallow sand and pebbles that help them grind their foods in their gizzard. They are omnivores and will eat insects, snakes and rodents. The male ostrich may have as many as five mates who lay their eyes in the same nest, which is incubated by the male at night. Contrary to popular myth, the Ostrich does not bury its head in the sand; they do use their wings for balance and display wing and tail feathers in courtship.