Angela Gregory

Angela Gregory (October 18, 1903 – February 13, 1990) was an American sculptor and professor of art. Gregory has been called the "doyenne of Louisiana sculpture". She became one of the few women of her era to be recognized nationally in a field generally dominated by men. Angela Gregory was born in October 18, 1903 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to parents William B. Gregory and Selina Bres Gregory. Her mother, Selina Bres Gregory, was an artist who studied at Newcomb College in New Orleans with William Woodward and Ellsworth Woodward. Her father, William B. Gregory, was an engineering professor at Tulane University. Angela was interested in art from an early age and began her career in the late 1920s. Gregory said she made her first piece of sculpture when she was twelve years old, crafting a birdbath out of chicken wire, concrete, and a wastebasket. Her early influences included her mother, Selina Bres Gregory (1870—1953), who had been a student of Ellsworth Woodward at Newcomb College in New Orleans and was an early Newcomb potter. As a child, Gregory was inspired by the story her mother told her about watching stonecutters carve an angel on the exterior of the Newcomb Chapel. “She used to tell me she loved to hear the sound of the tapping on [the stone]...Well, I was determined to do stone cutting.” After taking summer art classes as a teen from William Woodward at Tulane University and later as a student in the Newcomb art school, and studying sculpture in Charles Keck’s New York studio in 1924, Angela Gregory graduated from Newcomb in 1925 with a Bachelor of Arts in design. She was awarded a one-year scholarship to the Paris branch of the Parsons School of Fine and Applied Arts to study illustrative advertising. Her real purpose in going to Paris, however, was to study stonecutting with the noted French sculptor, Antoine Bourdelle. Bourdelle had been a praticien in the studio of Auguste Rodin for many years before establishing his own studio in Paris in a cluster of buildings located on what was then Impasse du Maine.