Violet McCluskey Reilly

Violet Roysten McCluskey Reilly died Wednesday at age 98. Violet was born March 30, 1925 in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in Glastonbury, Connecticut, Detroit, Michigan and Riverside, Rhode Island. Her parents were Jessie Biddy McCluskey, originally from Bridgetown, Barbados (later of Glastonbury), and R. Harry McCluskey, of New York. She showed an early talent for the visual arts, inspired by her grandmother Jessie Hill Biddy, an amateur artist, and her aunt Violet Biddy, a commercial artist for many years with the Phoenix Mutual Insurance Company of Hartford. Violet was already taking weekend art classes at the Rhode Island School of Design at age 11, and after graduating from high school enrolled at RISDI. She graduated from RISDI in 1946 with a BFA in Fine Art/Illustration, and took a job for two years as an art teacher at a private school in Woodstock Vermont, the Woodstock Country School. One of her students was future "Dallas" actor Larry Hagman. He was unenthused, and allegedly set fire to the barn where art class was held. After her stint as an art teacher she traveled to San Miguel Allende, where she attended the art graduate school then called the Escuela de Bellas Artes, affiliated with the University of Guanajuato, and studied with famed muralist David Alfaro Siquieros there. Her studies were cut short when the school was shut down, due in part to Siqueiros' Communist affiliation and political activities (Siquieros never quite lived down trying to assassinate Leon Trotsky in a drive by shooting in Mexico City in 1940), and so she returned to the United States and settled for a time in San Francisco, where she painted murals for the California Labor School and worked at the Madisonia Mannequin Refinishing Company, using her fine arts degree making wigs and painting faces on mannikins. Violet and a friend, Amy Middleton (later better known as Buffalo New York-based artist Amy Bice Hamouda) saved enough money from these gigs to move to Paris for further study.

Amy and Violet settled in Paris on the Left Bank, where Violet enrolled at the Grand Chaumiere and the Ecole de Beaux Artes. Part of their travel plans involved attending the (Comintern-sponsored) "World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace" in Warsaw, Poland in 1948. In Warsaw (as she put it) they "met many interesting people but didn't really get into the ideology." Having disrupted their studies and reconsidered some of their views, Violet and Amy decided to cut their Paris stay short and went back to the States. Attending the Conference got her questioned by the FBI upon her return to New York, but they left her alone after she admitted personally attending Communist-sponsored events without actually being a Communist, but refused to identify anyone else who was there.

Violet then worked as an art teacher at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where (without any warning, much less training) she was asked to work with "difficult children" who turned out to have psychiatric illnesses. Art therapy was little known at the time, but she was interested in the possibilities, and after working three years at Henry Street, was able to get a position at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. At the Menninger Clinic she was trained in the Menningers' Activity Therapy system, and then worked with patients under the supervision of "Dr. Karl" and "Dr. Will" (Menninger). Decades later her friends from Menninger would say "'Dr. Karl'" still remembers you." (He died in 1990 at 97). After five years at the Menninger Clinic she returned to Mexico and worked fulltime as an artist in Valle de Bravo and Oaxaca. By this time she had moved on from murals to oil on canvas and watercolors.

In Valle de Bravo, she met a fellow-Rhode Islander, William A. Reilly, a Korean War Veteran stretching his GI benefits in Mexico, and they ended up marrying . Volet always wanted to return to Mexico, but despite many travels, never did. With her husband, who worked for the Berlitz Schools of Languages, and their two children, Violet lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Montreal and Quebec City, Canada, and Buenos Aires Argentina as well as Washington, D.C. In the mid-1970s they returned to the US, and eventually moved to the Chicago area, where Violet returned to her art therapy career, belatedly completing her Masters degree long distance from the Instituto Allende, getting certified as an Art Therapist, and then working as an art therapist at the Chicago Lakeshore Hospital in Chicago, Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, and the Philip J. Rock Center and School in Glen Ellyn, where she worked with deaf/blind children. Violet loved her work and always had tremendous energy, and did not fully retire until she was almost 90. She never looked her age, and was once asked by a co-worker, when she was about 80, if she was going to retire 'when she turned 65.' Violet was a longtime member of the Illinois Art Therapy Association, and served on its Board and as Membership Director, as well as editing its newsletter for a time.

In her later years she traveled widely, in the West Indies to back Puerto Rico, to her mother's birthplace, Barbados, and to her grandfather's home island of St. Vincent. She also visited Ireland, Scotland and Wales, Bali, Indonesia, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, and also, on a trip sponsored by the Illinois Art Therapy Association, various locations in China. She had a great love of nature, and was a longtime member of the Morton Arboretum in Lisle and a regular visitor there for decades, sometimes sketching and drawing. Although she had been inactive as a working artist for years, some of her work was exhibited in Chicago through the Illinois Art Therapy Association about 12 years ago.

Violet died in her home in Lombard, Illinois on September 6 after a long illness. Violet's husband died in 1989. She is survived by their sons, Marcos (Laura) and Miguel, and a grandson, William C. Reilly, all of suburban Chicago, as well as her sister Emily McKenney of Saunderstown, Rhode Island, nieces and nephews, grandnieces and nephews, and grandnieces and nephews. Her other sister, Muriel Wilbur of Arlington, Virginia, died August 25. A memorial may be held in Rhode Island at a later date.