Mildred Ball
(Founding Member)
Clarksburg, WV | Exhibiting Since 1963
Mildred Lee Ball was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia. She attended West Virginia Wesleyan College and subsequently pursued studies at Columbia University. In 1928, she married William M. Ball. In 1936, after having taught high school in West Virginia for several years, she moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she taught home economics at Salem College, a private, liberal arts college for women. According to a 1936 article in the Charleston, WV Daily Mail, her duties at the college were multifaceted and included teaching “home nursing and child care, fine arts, textiles, and nutrition.”
In the late 1940s she was a founding member of the Art and Crafts Association of Winston-Salem (now the Sawtooth School for Visual Art) and in 1963 she became a founding member of Piedmont Craftsmen, Inc.
In 1955, her work was included in a highly influential contemporary jewelry exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and again in 1959, she was featured at the Walker.
In 1956, a pair of silver and enamel cuff links by Ball was featured in American Jewelry and Related Objects: The Second National Exhibition. The exhibition was organized by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester and toured nationally under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service.