In 1935, when Gregory Dowler Ivy, a northern-educated Midwesterner arrived at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) he quickly became known as a non-conformist. Lee Hall, a student of his, recalled how he “urged the female natives to seek and value freedom, to question what they had been taught was unquestionable, and to notice that most authority figures were swaggering around buck naked as the emperors they imagined themselves to be.”
Ivy was born in Clarksburg, Missouri, a small town in the central part of the state. He attended Tipton High School in the nearby town. He continued his education at the State Teachers College (now Central Missouri State University) in Warrensville, where he first earned a general diploma in 1926 and then a Bachelor of Science degree two years later. He majored in art history and had a minor in economics. Following graduation he taught junior and senior high school art classes in Saint Louis. Moving to New York, he studied painting and design at Teachers College, Columbia University, the oldest and largest graduate school of education in the country. Among its alumni were many prestigious artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, and Alma Thomas. Ivy received his master’s degree in 1931.
Pursuing his career as a teacher, between 1932 and 1935 Ivy was at State Teachers College in Indiana, Pennsylvania (now Indiana University of Pennsylvania). In 1935 he relocated to Greensboro and accepted the position of chairman of the art department at Woman’s College. In addition to upsetting the status quo he made significant contributions to the university; under his leadership the art department offered both bachelor and master of fine arts degrees, the only such program in the state until 1950. In addition to Lee Hall, Maud Gatewood, Mary Leath Thomas and McDonald Bane were also students of Ivy. He invited such nationally known painters as Franz Kline and Philip Guston to the Greensboro campus as visiting artists. In 1935, he established a summer art colony at Beaufort, North Carolina, which specialized in landscape painting well into the mid-1950s. In 1941 Ivy was instrumental in founding an art gallery at the college which evolved into the Weatherspoon Art Museum.
In 1952 Ivy assumed the leadership of the Burnsville School of the Fine Arts of the Woman’s College located north of Asheville. When Gatewood took classes there during the summer 1952, John Cage taught voice and choreography and Merce Cunningham conducted a dance program, and even though she did not study with them, she was aware of their presence. In 1954 the Burnsville program was combined with the painting program in Beaufort, until the following year when it was dissolved.
Despite all his accomplishments, Ivy did not feel that his department was getting the kind of support it deserved. In his 1961 letter of resignation to the university system’s chancellor he complained about lack of funding and wrote: “The art department is the only department here which is not housed, and yet, it is the best known nationally of all the departments. I feel that I can no longer assume the responsibility for maintaining decent standards under these conditions. The quality of the work done under these really outrageous and scandalous conditions suffers.” No longer affiliated with the college, Ivy worked a few years for a local architectural firm, Loewenstein and Atkinson, as design coordinator.
In 1965 Ivy returned to teaching as professor of art at California State University, Fullerton. He served as department chair for two years, 1965 to 1967, and upon his retirement in 1971 he settled in Missouri. At the time of his death he was living in Springfield. Just as he was progressive in his attitudes toward education—and in particular that of women—Ivy was decidedly a modernist in his own paintings. At times these display traces of cubist influence, at others they have a more surrealist bent. Some of the paintings he did at Beaufort, however, are more realistic landscape studies.