Biography

(American, 1937 - 2012)

Nellie Taft was a hometown girl, born in 1937 in Indian Hill and died in 2012 in Boston. She attended Lotspeich and Hillsdale Schools in Cincinnati, and finished her high school education at St. Timothy’s School in Baltimore. Nellie was the great-great grand niece of William Howard Taft and had connections to William Henry Harrison. She was also a member of the Taft Broadcasting Company family.

Withstanding all of that, Nellie was anything but a society grande dame with Sunday painter syndrome. A little deeper look into her C. V. reveals her artist bona fides. After two years at Briarcliff College, she transferred to the progressive Reed College in Oregon where she first began to paint in 1959.

In 1966 she received a B. A. in art history from Columbia. She also earned an M. A. in art education from Columbia in 1968.

Back in Cincinnati, Nellie spent 1982 at the Art Academy before moving to Boston where she earned a diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Art in 1990 and graduated from the fifth-year program the following year. In conjunction with that, she received two traveling scholarships and spent a year in Rome.

Carrie Blackmore Smith in “Lives Remembered” in The Enquirer, wrote, “Described as witty, courageous, and vivacious, she could fly a plane, drive a speedboat, and traveled the world, from India and China to Portugal and Spain, Colombia – even lived a year in a log cabin in the Scandinavian region of Lapland, in the Arctic circle.”

In The Boston Globe obituary, Anita Lincoln, a friend and neighbor from Back Bay, said, “Because of her artistic sense, she was always beautifully presented, She dressed impeccably. She just had exquisite taste.”

She served on the national committee at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1993 until her death in 2012. Chairwoman Flora Whitney Biddle, granddaughter of the Museum’s founder described her in a Boston obituary as “both a lover and creator of art. Spirited, talented, and fun to be with – we all treasured her involvement.”

Nellie was certainly aware of art history and contemporary artists, which showed in the 2013 retrospective at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery, curated by Denny Young, former curator of painting at the Cincinnati Art Museum and, by-the-by, a cousin. The exhibition, “Nellie Taft: Odyssey, A Lifelong Journey through Art,” was described as a tribute to her lifelong journey, an intellectual and artistic quest. While at Columbia in the late 1960s, Nellie had a studio in a loft in lower Manhattan and presumably got to know the Abstract Expressionist crowd. Alison Hunt in a 1991 profile in The Beacon Hill/Back Bay Chronicle writes she was “involved with emerging artists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Klien (sic).”