Background
Ruth Hutton was born to William Hutton and his wife.
Ruth Hutton was born to William Hutton and his wife.
She attended what is now Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, which was known as Bloomsburg State Normal School when she graduated in 1918.
Hutton Ancker"s ancestors immigrated to Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania in 1810, and they were among the first settlers there. Hutton Ancker"s grandfather, Daniel Snyder, donated the ten acres on which the local normal school, which she would attend as a student, was built. In the early 1940s, she went on to study at Columbia University where she earned a degree in fine arts
She continued studying art at the Philadelphia Museum School, Parsons School of Design, the University of New Mexico and Cincinnati Art Academy.
Hutton Ancker began her visual arts career in the 1920s as a fashion illustrator and designer, working in New York and Paris. At one point, she was employed in the French office of Women"s Wear Daily.
She told the Morning Press that she had produced thousands of illustrations, but the originals were purchased by various publications and few examples survived. In New York, she studied under Oronzio Maldarelli for several years, and it was he who encouraged her to pursue sculpture as a full time endeavor.
She also learned from Ferenc Varga, Antonucci Volti, and Alessandro Monteleone.
Hutton Ancker taught art at Cooper Union, New York Pratt Institute, Brooklyn University of Alabama, and the University of Cincinnati. Hutton Ancker"s work was exhibited in Paris, Rome, and New York, and she once gave a one-woman show of her sculptures at Bloomsburg State College"s Haas Gallery. In New York, her work was shown at the Ward Eggleston Galleries at 969 Madison Avenue in 1959 and 1963.
In 1970, the William Penn Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania gave a retrospective exhibit of her work.
University Woman magazine named her "one of the outstanding women in New Jersey history." She was elected to membership in the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Painters and Sculptors Society of New Jersey, and the National Society of Arts and Letters. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania maintains a special collection of scholarship and media coverage relevant to Hutton Ancker, who is an alumna.
The collection includes ten of her notebooks.
