Plastic Club

Philadelphia was more supportive of women artists than most cities because of the early establishment of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1850 and the steady expansion of courses for female students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. But at the end of the nineteenth century, women still lacked professional organizations where they could exhibit, collaborate, and socialize with other artists. In 1897, Emily Sartain, director of the School of Design (now Moore College of Art and Design), rallied support for a women’s art organization that became known as the Plastic Club. Violet Oakley and her colleagues, Elizabeth Shippen Green and Jessie Willcox Smith, were founding members. Oakley made a sketch for the Plastic Club seal with the head of a Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza in the background, but it is not known if the design was ever used. The Egyptian theme was perhaps related to her recent advertisement for the Lotos Library, published by J. B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia the year before.

In February 1902, Oakley, Smith, and Green held a group show at the Plastic Club’s first venue at 10 South 18th Street. Designed with asymmetrical flat planes like a Japanese print, Oakley’s poster for the exhibition included the image of a woman bent at a right angle watering three red roses in the foreground and a man at a fountain in a formal garden framed by a pergola. Holding long stem roses, the artists posed for a humorous photograph imitating the poster which alluded to their anticipated move, with their horticulturist friend Henrietta Cozens, to the Red Rose Inn in Villanova in the weeks after the show.

To raise funds to purchase a property for the Plastic Club, members made color lithographs of historic buildings in Philadelphia and sold them as postcards. In 1903, Oakley contributed a rendering of Gloria Dei (Old Swede’s) Church, the oldest church in the city, dating from the time of William Penn. In 1909, the Plastic Club acquired its current home on Camac Street, where the Philadelphia Sketch Club was also located. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s description of the Plastic Club on June 21, 1912, as a “bohemian organization of well-known women” can be counted a measure of the organization’s success.