Bernadine Custer Papers

The life of Bernadine Custer is marked by a long and prolific career in the American arts community. Born in Normal, Illinois at the turn of the twentieth century to a decidedly normal, large catholic family, she left home at an early age to begin a life as an artist. After graduating from Illinois State University at Normal in 1920 she moved to Chicago to attend the Chicago Art Institute. Upon completing four years of instruction there she became an art teacher in 1924. This profession was to sustain her financially throughout her life as she worked on her mural, oil, watercolor painting, and sketching.

Around this time she met her husband, Arthur "Jimmy" Sharp, who was also an artist and a native of Great Britain. They married in 1928 and spent a year living in England, then returned to New York City. Sometime in the mid-1930s the couple purchased a house in Landgrove, Vermont, which they used as a seasonal retreat. Later they sold that house and moved to Londonderry, continuing to split their time between painting and renovating the Vermont home and teaching and producing graphic art in New York.

In 1933 Bernadine was commissioned by the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture to paint a mural in the Summerville, S.C. post office as part of the newly created new Deal art projects. She remained affiliated with the Section, and its descendants the Federal Artist's project and the Public Works of Art Project, until they were dissolved in 1943, creating a post office mural for the town of Woodstock, Vermont as well.

During the 1930s she also began a career as a successful graphic artist and writer, publishing in the New Yorker, Common Ground, Scribner's, Today, Fiction Parade, and Vermont Life, among others. It was during this period that she began her association with a number of prominent American artists, many of whom spent off-seasons in Vermont. Among these were Paul Sample, Carl Ruggles, and Thomas Hart Benton. She began exhibiting her work in galleries around the country, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Addison Gallery in Andover, Massachusetts, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.

In the 1950s she began teaching at New York's Pratt Institute, and stayed on the faculty there well into the 1980s. She also became an early member of the Southern Vermont Art Center, and for many years taught children's art classes there and in her home. When Jimmy died in the late '60s she began to spend more time in the Londonderry house, eventually considering herself enough of a Vermonter to begin corresponding regularly with Congressman James Jeffords.

Custer remained an avid traveler and letter-writer well into her eighties. In 1990 she moved from her Londonderry house to a nearby nursing home, where she died in 1991.