Elizabeth Layton
(1909–1993)
BornWellsville, Kansas, United States
DiedOlathe, Kansas, United States
BiographyElizabeth Layton’s colored-pencil self-portraits candidly depict the process of aging, with all its wrinkles, liver spots, and arthritic joints. Although the roles she cast herself in change—in one drawing she is a stately Mona Lisa posed between objects of life and fantasy, in another she is a nude Eve in the Garden of Eden recoiling from the snake and the apple—they always reflect on the complexities of how it feels to be human, and particularly a woman growing older. She often signed her works “Grandma Layton,” and yet this bold and vivacious figure is far from a stereotypical grandmother. As she developed her practice over the years, she added commentary on social and political issues such as poverty, police brutality, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, the right to die, and racial prejudice, approaching each with empathy and her distinctively defiant sense of humor.Layton was sixty-eight years old when she started creating art, and over just fifteen years she made hundreds of pieces. Born in 1909 in the small town of Wellsville, Kansas, into a family of writers, she later served as the managing editor for the Wellsville Globe following the death of her father, its publisher. A divorce that left her raising five children alone contributed to a downturn in her life, compounded by a deep and inescapable depression that was not alleviated by medication or a series of electroshock treatments. When she took an art class at a local university in 1977, she finally found a restorative outlet in blind contour drawing, in which she focused on herself in the mirror, rather than the paper, as she drew. “You are nonjudgmental when you don’t look at the drawings,” she explained in a 1986 People magazine article. “Things pour into them which you get not by thinking but by feeling.”
Layton’s art in a student show caught the eye of writer Don Lambert, who subsequently helped promote her work, leading to a 1980 solo show at the Wichita Art Museum. The year before her death, in 1993, she had a solo show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with around thirty drawings on subjects ranging from world hunger and nuclear threats to marriage and depression. In a 1991 interview published in Art Journal, she said of her art, “All I hope is that a few people will see [it] and ask themselves the same question I did. How do I feel? What do I believe? Who am I?”
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).