Cornell University Library Digital Collections

Alison Mason Kingsbury: Life and Art

Untitled (bedroom)

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About this collection

This collection contains digital surrogates of drawings, illustrations, paintings, charcoal landscape drawings, exhibition catalogs, and sketches created by Alison Mason Kingsbury. This collection includes material from the Alison Mason Kingsbury papers held by Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, as well as various private collections, including materials held at The History Center in Tompkins County.

These materials were selected and digitized to support an exhibition, The Art & Life of Alison Mason Kingsbury, on display in Cornell University Library in 2010.

Historical context

Alison Mason Kingsbury was an artist in Ithaca, N.Y. who produced a vast range of works, from commissioned murals to regionalist depictions of the Finger Lakes area to small abstract collages. Mason Kingsbury was born in New Hampshire in 1898 and studied art history and physics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. After college, she studied at the Art Students’ League and designed greeting cards. In 1922, she traveled to Europe and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleau in France. After returning to the US, she joined muralist Ezra Winter’s studio. Cornell University commissioned Winter to decorate the main lobby of its student union in 1925. While an assistant on that project, Mason Kingsbury met and married Morris Bishop, Romance languages professor, and remained in Ithaca after the project completed.

Once in Ithaca, Mason Kingsbury developed a body of work that included a panel for Cornell’s World War I Memorial Chapel, oil landscapes of the Finger Lakes area, a mural for the Canastota Post Office, The Adventures of Phunsi (a book written for her daughter), numerous book illustrations, a mural project for Cornell University’s Gannett Health Clinic, illustrations for the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and collage and cut paper work. She died in Ithaca in 1988, at the age of ninety.

Using the collection

For questions about this collection, contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.

More information

Collection steward
Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts
Metadata creation
Cornell University Library
Credits
This collection overview was adapted from the 2010 exhibit featuring Alison Mason Kingsbury's work and last reviewed and updated by Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts in 2025.
Collection sources
Exhibits featuring items from this collection