Ruth Starr Rose
1887–1965

Introduction

Ruth Starr Rose (1887–1965) was an American artist. She was a painter, lithographer and serigrapher, and best known for her paintings of African American life in Maryland in the 1930s and 1940s.

This important woman artist's work has toured throughout Maryland, the United States, and Europe as a unique example of an early American Shared Community expressed through pigment and paint. Additionally, Rose is credited as the first white artist to create a work of art for a black church. The subject of her fresco, Pharaoh's Army Got Drownded, was to honor the minister's son who perished in training for WWII.