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About the painting

This portrait of María Torres is the only known image of the wife of the celebrated ceramicist Jesús Torres. The geometry and flattened planes of the portrait suggest the fusion of styles expressed in the art of Hull-House, including Mexican craft and modernist abstraction.

As a child growing up on Maxwell Street, the artist took classes at Hull-House and then studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. Later, she pioneered the teaching of art as a form of therapy, working with young people at Hull-House and with psychiatric patients. Dreikurs believed that art’s value was in the process of creativity rather than in the worth of the final work. She named her art therapy book Cows Can Be Purple after a memorable experience in the first grade, when a teacher ripped up her drawing of a purple cow, insisting that it be brown.