Mildred Bryant Brooks is a celebrated California woman artist known for her detailed and technically skilled depictions of trees and landscapes around Southern California executed in the black and white etching medium.

Brooks was born in Missouri but grew up in Long Beach, California. She studied at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, from 1921-1925 under artist Frank Tolles Chamberlain, and worked as a part-time teacher there as well. Brooks also attended the Otis Art Institute and Chouinard Institute in Los Angeles. In 1929, Brooks began studying etching under Arthur Millier, and she worked for the next three decades producing a large body of works in that medium. She also started teaching at the Stickney School in Pasadena that year. Her teacher, Millier wrote in a Los Angeles Times column in 1936 that she created "America's best etchings of trees."

In 1946, Brooks was an artist-in-residence at Pomona College, California, and she taught at the Los Angeles County Art Institute in 1952 and 1954. In the early 1960s, Brooks' eyesight began to fail. Initially she changed her style, working with larger images, mural painting and even interior decoration, but eventually she was forced to give up making art but continued to teach and lecture.

Brooks exhibited nationally and internationally throughout her relatively short career including at the National Academy of Design, New York; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; and the Paris International, France. She was the President of the California Printmakers eight times, and exhibited frequently with the group. She had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. (1936), and the Laguna Art Museum (1975).

Her works are in the collections of a number of important public institutions: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Laguna Art Museum; Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.; National Gallery, Washington D.C.; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. She received over twenty national and international awards throughout her career including the Pasadena Arts Council Gold Crown Artist Award in 1976.

Sources:

Askart.com

"Women Artists of the American West" by Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick