In a 1988 interview with The New York Times, Atlanta
Sampson, then ninety-one, said of her career
as an artist: “It was just as necessary as eating
and sleeping for me to paint. It was an obsession all
my life. It was an inner drive all my life. It was God’s
plan.”
Sampson was born in 1896 on a farm north of
Toeterville, Iowa, near the Minnesota border. As a
child she obtained watercolor paints by mail-order
from Chicago in order to start painting. After high
school it took her two years to convince her Norwegian
born parents that it was important for her
to study art at the University of Minnesota, from
which she received her degree in 1923. Upon graduation
Sampson moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she
taught art in the public schools for twenty years.
In 1947 Sampson moved to New York City to pursue
a career as an artist, which proved to be a struggle.
Although she sold few works and had to take
temporary jobs to get by, Sampson never gave up.
She continued to study, taking classes with famed
artist and teacher Hans Hoffman in Provincetown,
Massachusetts in the summer, and enrolling in the
Art Students League in New York with teachers
Theodore Stamos and Thomas Fogerty, among others.
At age eighty-four she received a full scholarship
to attend the Art Students League.
At the age of ninety, and in failing health, Sampson
resigned herself to moving back to Iowa, her dream
of a one-woman show in a prominent gallery having
eluded her. The deli downstairs from her tiny apartment
offered to give her a farewell show, at which she
was at last discovered. True Colors: The Paintings of
Atlanta Constance Sampson, 1896-Present opened
in May of 1988 at the National Arts Club in New York
City, and many exhibitions followed, including one in
the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building
in Washington, D.C. on her ninety-sixth birthday.
Sampson finally succeeded, before she died, one year
short of her hundredth birthday. Her work is owned
by collectors across the country, and her art and
her spirit are celebrated in the Unionhurst Gallery
in Toeterville, Iowa, which is overseen by her nephew,
Fred Langrock.
Gregory Jaynes, “About New York; An Artist at
91: Her First Show Outside the Deli,” The New York
Times (April 20, 1988)
www.atlantasampson.com
