Bailey, Odessa Pittard (1906–1994) – Encyclopedia Virginia encyclopediavirginia.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from encyclopediavirginia.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Clark returned to Virginia and taught classes in illustration at the Art Club of Richmond and was an instructor at the Richmond Training School for Kindergartners. About 1916 she and the Richmond artist Nora Houston established the Atelier. Their studio became a training ground for a generation of Virginia artists, including Theresa Pollak, who later founded the art program at the University of Richmond and the art school at Virginia Commonwealth University. Intending to revive the long-moribund eighteenth-century Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts, Clark and Houston in 1919 founded the Virginia League of Fine Arts and Handicrafts, which later merged with the Atelier and became part of the Richmond Academy of Arts. A painter primarily of portraits, landscapes, and religious scenes, Clark exhibited canvases at the Carnegie Institute, in Pittsburgh, and at Richmond’s Valentine Museum. Her oil painting
Adair was born on November 9, 1884, at Red Sulphur Springs in Monroe County, West Virginia. She was the second of three daughters and fifth of eight children of Lewis Cass Adair and Rebecca Sidney Taylor Adair. The family moved to Richmond, where Adair attended Richmond Female Seminary and graduated from Richmond High School. At age seventeen she took a clerical job at an insurance company and enrolled in a course for teachers at Richmond High School. Adair and her sisters, who also became teachers, probably chose careers in education in emulation of other family members.
Adair began her career teaching at Elba Elementary School in Richmond in 1904. During the next fifteen years she taught at Nicholson, Robert Fulton, and Bellevue elementary schools and took summer courses at Columbia University, Richmond Normal School, and New York University. In 1921 she enrolled as a full-time student at the College of William and Mary, and two years later she received her AB degree. Adair joined