Ida Lansky

Contemplation by Ida Lansky, c. 1950 s, Vintage Silver Gelatin Print

c. 1950 s

Ida G. (Laranbaum) Lansky was born in 1910 in Toronto, Canada. She pursued many careers in her lifetime including Nursing, Art, and Library Science. In 1928 she moved to New York City and later attended New York University, The Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn, NY and Cornell University. In 1942 she received a B.S. in Public Health Nursing. Ida Lansky moved to Hawaii in 1945 and married Irving Lansky. She then moved to Norman, Oklahoma and then to Denton, Texas where she studied art and was mother to two children, Ellen and Michele. From 1954 - 1959 she was in the Visual Art studies program at Texas Women’s University in Denton with an emphasis on photography. She studied under Carlotta Corpron. 1959 marked a peak in her art career when she exhibited her photographs in a group exhibition curated by Henry Holmes Smith at the Art Center Gallery at Indiana University. Her photographs were exhibited among many well-known figures in the photography world including Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, and Harry Callahan. Ida Lansky continued to exhibit her work up until 1960 when she decided to study Library Science at Texas Women’s University. She received her Master of Library Science degree with honors in 1967. Her new career led to working at the University of Texas at Arlington. She divorced her husband in 1970 and continued working as a librarian. She died in Dallas in 1997. Ida Lansky’s work is included is private collections and major institutions such as, El Paso Museum, the Amon Carter Museum and the New York Public Library, Pompidou Museum, Paris, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In 2021, her work was exhibited in the group show, Women in Abstraction, at the Pompidou Museum and later, at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.