{"person":[{"sourceId":{"label":"Source ID","value":"2224"},"lastName":{"label":"Last Name","value":"Layton"},"endDate":{"label":"Death Date","value":"1993"},"displayName":{"label":"Name","value":"Elizabeth Layton"},"objects":{"label":"Objects","value":[{"objectTitle":"Cornucopia","objectNumber":"2016.29.1","objectID":"5452"},{"objectTitle":"Mountain Climbing","objectNumber":"2023.9.1","objectID":"8813"},{"objectTitle":"Mona Lisa","objectNumber":"2014.16.2","objectID":"4695"},{"objectTitle":"Garden of Eden","objectNumber":"2014.16.1","objectID":"4694"},{"objectTitle":"My Own Gulliver in Brobdingnag","objectNumber":"2015.7.1","objectID":"5030"}]},"geographyDied":{"label":"Died","value":["Wellsville","Olathe"]},"biography":{"label":"Biography","value":"Elizabeth Layton\u2019s 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\u2014in 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\u2014they always reflect on the complexities of how it feels to be human, and particularly a woman growing older. She often signed her works \u201cGrandma Layton,\u201d 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\u2019s 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 <em>Wellsville Globe<\/em> 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. \u201cYou are nonjudgmental when you don\u2019t look at the drawings,\u201d she explained in a 1986 <em>People<\/em> magazine article. \u201cThings pour into them which you get not by thinking but by feeling.\u201dLayton\u2019s 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 <em>Art Journal<\/em>, she said of her art, \u201cAll 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?\u201dAllison C. Meier, 2025Text written as part of \u201cRethinking Biography,\u201d an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)."},"geographyActive":{"label":"Active","value":["Wellsville","Olathe"]},"geographyBorn":{"label":"Born","value":["Wellsville","Olathe"]},"beginDate":{"label":"Birth Date","value":"1909"},"firstName":{"label":"First Name","value":"Elizabeth"},"primaryMedia":{"value":"https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/5180/full"},"names":{"label":"Names","value":["Elizabeth Layton","Grandma Layton"]},"displayDate":{"label":"Date","value":"(1909\u20131993)"},"id":{"label":"Id","value":"151408"}}]}