The daughter of a classically-trained pianist mother and a concert violinist father, she had an intellectually stimulating upbringing enhanced by Christian Science values. she enrolled in the College of Education at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1919. But she quickly  gave up the idea of becoming a teacher and entered at the John Herron Art Institute (whose collections are now part of the Indianapolis Museum of Art). The Institute’s early faculty educated artists in the realist tradition. True’s teacher and mentor, William Forsyth, gave her an excellent foundation in drawing and the technical aspects of painting and composition. Forced to start earning a living when in the early 1920's her father's buisness went bankrupt the Herron Institute hired her as an instructor for its art school, allowing her to support herself while she finished her studies. After graduating she received in 1925 a one-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. William Forsyth wrote in his recommendation: “I can say without exaggeration that she was one of the best pupils I ever had during the twenty-five years I was a teacher at the John Herron Art School.”

In the summer of 1928 True experienced both New Mexico communities and Southwest culture firsthand when traveling with some of her friends from the Herron Institute who had relocated to Boulder in 1927 and were teaching at the University of Colorado. 

In1929, she accepted an instructor’s position on the faculty of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder

1931,  True and four other artists, who were also teachers at CU, formed an artist group they called “The Prospectors.” The Prospectors were four women and one man: True, Muriel Sibell Wolle, Francis Hoar, Gwendolym Meux and Clement Trucksess (husband of Francis).

They believed in art generating from the spirit of place; they were regional modernists who were influenced by the Western landscape. The Prospectors’ manifesto claimed inspiration from the natural beauty of the mountains and plains of Boulder, as well as the ghosts of Indians, mountain men and pioneers.

By 1935 she recognized that her Bachelor of Arts degree was insufficient for faculty advancement at the University of Colorado in Boulder, so she entered the two-year Master of Fine Arts program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. During the summers she visited Boulder, maintaining her affiliation with The Prospectors.

Unfortunately, by the time she recieved her Masters they were no open positions at CU, so in 1939 she joined the faculty at Cornell eventually becoming head of the Department of Housing and Design. At Cornell she earned more than she previously had, allowing her to pursue art. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, she recorded the intensity of urban life in her New York Series that included paintings and works on paper in charcoal and ink. At the same time, she retained her emotional ties to the West. indicated by her painting, Reclinimg Nude. Retired from Cornell in 1965, she spent the balance of her life at Yarmouth on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and continued to paint and exhibit until her death in 1989.

Solo Exhibitions:

Lieber Gallery, Indianapolis, Indiana (1928); Museum of Fine Arts (now the New Mexico Museum of Art), Santa Fe (1932); Chappell House-Denver Art Museum (1933); “Retrospective,” Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art-Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (1965).

Group Exhibitions: Museum of Fine Art, Santa Fe (1931); “Annual Colorado Artists Exhibition,” Denver Art Museum (1932-1935); National Association of Women Artists, New York (1933); “Midwestern Artists Exhibition,” Kansas City Art Institute (1934, 1935); Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, New York (1939); “Trends in American Art,” Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (1941); “Pioneers:  Women Artists in Boulder, 1898-1950,” University of Colorado at Boulder (2016-17);

Collections: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana; Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis; Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver; University of Colorado, Boulder; Colorado State University, Fort Collins.

 

Virginia True's works often depicts men, women in this picture herself or sometimes just man-made structures setting them into the landscape. Her composition  reveal her take on the human condition and its relation to nature. In this picture the artists paints herself reclining nude as she lays comforrtably at the top of The Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range at 14,000 feet as she stretches herself reaching the mouintains of SantaFe seen through a window next to where her head is resting. She is confident,  applying color forms to shape the composition while the line seem to sink in  using rapid brushstrokes r brushstrokes do not hesitate apllying contrasted colors  colors colors  the forms that shapes the composition. the lines are accentuated and deep   colors define the away to True, however, was able to inject a feeling of intimacy and warmth into the starkness of the scenes. One senses that Virginia was able to find a pleasing "connection" wherever she was. Greenhouse (plate 33) underscores this quality through its bold, exuberant use of color and form. The jungle of plants dominant in the foreground, paired with the landscape paintings tacked on the wall make for an ironic contrast with the empty exterior scene viewed through the window. Nature is brought indoors -- not just the plants, but also the bright sunlight that illuminates the interior scene. Despite their contrasts, and the man-made repositioning of the natural world, the two spaces, inside and out, are somehow seamless; and both are cheerful and inviting.