JULIA THECLA

Delavan, Illinois, 1896 — Chicago, Illinois, 1973

Born Julia Thecla Connell in the rural town of Delavan, Illinois, Julia Thecla occupied a wholly distinctive place within Chicago's surrealist and magical realist circles — a painter known for dreamlike, jewel-toned compositions of fairies, dancers, celestial realms, and the female form, rendered with a precision and mystery that set her wholly apart from her contemporaries. Around 1920 she moved to Chicago, severed ties with her family after, dropped her surname, and fashioned an entirely new artistic identity — a gesture that speaks to the deliberate self-invention at the core of her practice. She supported herself through art and antique restoration, a meticulous craft whose habits of exacting surface detail she carried directly into her paintings.

Largely self-directed, Thecla studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, participating in Francis Chapin's lithography class and producing three prints — her only known work in the medium. From 1938 to 1942 she worked in the WPA's easel division, producing more prosaic subjects while her inner world of fantasy quietly deepened. Her work was first exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931, appearing there annually through the mid-1940s, and she became an active member of the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, the Neoterics, and the Chicago Society of Artists. Her closest artistic affinities were with Ivan Albright and Gertrude Abercrombie, whose shared tendency toward surrealism and the fantastical resonated with her own. She also designed costumes and stage sets for three ballets choreographed by Berenice Holmes in 1945–46, extending her visual sensibility into performance.

Her work Magnifying Glass (1942) was included in Peggy Guggenheim's Exhibition by 31 Women (1943); the painting's current location remain unknown and no photographs of it has been found. That same year her work appeared at MoMA in New York, marking the beginning of national recognition.

Following the rise of abstraction, Thecla faded from critical view, a marginalization scholars have attributed to both the period's anti-figurative bias and the structural neglect of women artists not affiliated with prominent men. In 1969 she was displaced from her long-time apartment due to renovation, losing possessions and unpublished poetry; she died in a nursing home in 1973. Recent decades have brought meaningful institutional recovery. The Hirshhorn Museum included her dreamlike mixed-media works from the 1960s in Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection (2022), and her painting Young Crow (1943) was presented in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25) and 31 Mulheres at MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025). Works by Thecla are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the DePaul Art Museum, and the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis.

Work by Julia Thecla is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Thecla's contributions in the record of art history.