St. Olaf College

Rainey Bennett

Contemporary artist
United States
1907 - 1988

View objects by this artist.

Rainey Bennett was born in Marion, Indiana, in 1907. His artistic career began in high school, when he was a cartoonist in Oak Park, Illinois. He enrolled in the University of Chicago, and apparently paid for school by playing as a tenor banjo in a jazz band. He graduated in 1929 before going on to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His artistic career advanced when he went to study at the Art Students League in New York. By the late 1930s, he had returned to Chicago and was teaching at SAIC. From 1935 to 1938, Bennett directed the Illinois Art Project’s decoration project at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago, which included murals, mosaics, and stained glass.

Bennett was extremely well-known for his watercolors, and was commissioned by Standard Oil of New Jersey to travel to Venezuela and create a series of watercolors from his travels. These works were shown in New York in 1940. After the second World War, Bennett continued his artistic career, and in the 1960s returned to SAIC to teach once again. He passed away in Chicago in 1988.

Madison Duran ‘20
February 2020

Sources:
Schulman, Daniel. “Rainey Bennett.” Modernism in the New City,
www.chicagomodern.org/artists/rainey_bennett/.