Fredonia Post Office

"Delivery of Mail to the Farm"

1937

Artist

1909-1988

Born in 1909, Lenore Thomas Straus grew up in Chicago and studied at the Chicago Art Institute, but she was largely as self-taught sculptor whose medium of choice was stone. Early in her career she was interested in integrating her sculpture with architecture. Finding no work in Chicago during the Depression, she went to New York and from there to Washington D.C. in 1935. Working for the Resettlement Administration, she made a number of large stone carvings for their newly built communities. Later, she became a W.P.A. artist and carved a 12' x 4' x 4' limestone figure of a mother and child for the town center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as well as other small pieces. She showed her work at the Chicago Art Institute, the Metropolitan and Whitney Museums, the Corcoran Gallery, the Baltimore Museum, and at private galleries in Chicago, New York, Washington, and Maine. The author of The Tender Stone and Stone Dust, Straus moved to Blue Hill, Maine in 1968, where she continued to carve and to explore pictorial expression in handmade paper. Straus died in 1988, at age 78, in her home in Blue Hill.