Myra Wiggins

Myra Wiggins trained as a painter at the Art Students League in New York before deciding to pursue photography as a career. Though she always described herself an amateur photographer, her career was highly successful. She won numerous awards and exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Wiggins also was a member of both London’s Linked Ring and New York’s Photo-Secession, exclusive and pivotal early organizations in the development and promotion of photography as an art form.

In the 1910s, Wiggins once again began to focus on painting building an international reputation and coming to be known as the “Dean of Northwest Women Painters.” She had one-person exhibitions in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans and helped found the Women Painters of Washington. Seattle Art Museum held a major retrospective exhibition of her paintings and photographs in 1953 followed by the De Young Museum, San Francisco the following year.