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The artist, journalist, organizer and beloved friend of COA, for whom the Blum Gallery is named.
Born in Montreal, Canada, Ethel Halsey Blum (1900-1991) was raised in New Orleans and graduated from Wellesley College. She worked as a newspaper reporter for the New Orleans Item before heading to Europe, where she reported on society and
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Photo of Ethel Halsey Blum by Bradford Bachrach | sports for The Paris Herald (now the International Herald Tribune) during the 1920s. She later wrote for the New York Bureau of the Associated Press, where she received the first byline credit given to a woman in that agency. During World War II, Mrs. Blum chaired the Brooklyn chapter of Bundles for Britain and was a member of the Mayor's Committee on Civilian Defense. In 1944, she became chairman of the Brooklyn Prisoner of War Packaging Center, one of five Red Cross groups that shipped over two million food packages to American prisoners of war in Europe and the Far East.
Mrs. Blum social engagement continued after the war. In 1952 she was a delegate to the White House Conference on Aging. A founding member of the Brooklyn committee for Planned Parenthood and a patron of a number of arts-related organizations in New York City, Mrs. Blum was also active on Mount Desert Island. She served on the Acadia National Park committee, the Mount Desert Island Hospital board of trustees, the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, and the Mount Desert Island highway safety council, which she founded. After her husband, Robert E. Blum, joined College of the Atlantic's board of trustees in 1973, Mrs. Blum often attended college and board functions with her husband.
A student at the Art Students League in New York City and the Brooklyn Academy in the 1930s and 1940s, Mrs. Blum organized and headed an art students' committee, which evolved into the Brooklyn Museum Art School. She later studied under the late Eliot O'Hara and the late Edgar A. Whitney. She exhibited her watercolors widely in her lifetime, with shows in the Bahamas, New York City and throughout New England. She was particularly active as a painter during the last thirty years of her life. Among other venues, her watercolors were shown at the National Academy (with the American Watercolor Society) and at the Wadsworth Atheneum.
"I am interested in trying to capture the essence of a place or a subject, its atmosphere or aura," Mrs. Blum once wrote. A longtime summer resident of Mount Desert Island, she took special pleasure in painting Maine coast views.
Anyone interested in Mrs. Blum's work may contact her son, John R.H. Blum, at jrhblum@aol.com.
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