Biography

Nellie  M. (Castor) Gebers: Was born in 1901 and raised in the small community of Ira, Iowa.  Nellie Castor's desire to paint appeared at an early age. In June 1920, she married John Gebers. The couple moved to Denver, Colorado, and she enrolled at the Denver Art Institute, studying under Robert Graham; after a brief stay, the pair returned to Iowa and purchased a farm in the Lincoln, Iowa area. Gebers attended the Cummings School of Art in Des Moines and became a founding member of the Waterloo (Iowa) Art Association (1932). There, she met fellow artist Lela Powers Briggs, and the two artists became close friends, choosing to both attend the Stone City Art Colony together in 1933. Nellie's Colony experience made a tremendous impact, fostering her long friendship with Grant Wood, his sister (Nan Wood Graham), and Marvin Cone.

Fresh from her Stone City experience, Gebers enrolled in Wood's summer art classes at the University of Iowa (1934, 1935) and exhibited frequently at the Iowa Art Salon, Iowa State Fair (1934-1935). She was featured at the 1936 Biennial Show at the Corcoran Gallery (Washington, D.C.) and at the All-Iowa Exhibition in Chicago (1937). She received first place honors from the Carson, Pirie, Scott gallery (Chicago, 1937) and won "Best in Show" at the Iowa Art Salon in 1941.

Gebers showed her paintings in county and state fairs; the artist had several collaborative exhibitions with Lela Powers Briggs and Jessie Parrott Loomis, a Waterloo, Iowa artist. Gebers, along with Briggs and Loomis, were among the first artists to be displayed at a new Cedar Falls, Iowa gallery, now known as the Hearst Center for the Arts. While actively showing her work, Gebers remained primarily an art teacher, offering classes in her Lincoln, Iowa studio, teaching art in the local public schools (1934-1942), teaching elementary art for the Waterloo Public Schools, as well as being an art instructor at the University of Northern Iowa. Nellie maintained a second studio in Marshalltown, Iowa, where she was also a teacher and active member of the Central Iowa Art Association.

Following her husband's retirement (1959), the couple relocated to Saratoga, California. Gebers remained an art teacher for the rest of her life, teaching, critiquing, and painting, even as she was in her nineties and classified as legally blind. She often focused upon barns and rural landscapes as subjects; the relocation from Iowa coincided with her movement from oil into encaustic. A prolific artist, Gebers produced some 3,000 paintings in her lifetime and was working on a collection of children's stories and its illustrations when she died in Mountain View, California in February 1995