NEW YORK, NY.- Nearly 50 drawings by Elizabeth Layton (1909-1993) have been given recently to art museums including the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum and the Hammer Museum at UCLA.

Layton (Grandma Layton) gained national attention for her imaginative self-portraits in which she portrayed herself squarely in the center of current events. She had solo exhibitions in more than 150 museums, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and feature stories in Life, People and Parade magazines and on National Public Radio.

The recent gifts had been donated to the Lawrence Arts Center in Kansas near the artist's home in Wellsville. The Lawrence Arts Center, a community-focused organization came to realize that it did not have the resources to adequately preserve and exhibit this important body of work so the staff asked Don Lambert to find new homes for the drawings.

Lambert "discovered" Layton's work 38 years ago when he was a young newspaper reporter. Her longtime champion, who now lives in Kansas City, commented, "I am pleased to continue to widen and deepen the appreciation of this artist on a national level. While basically untrained, she has a foothold in contemporary art." Lambert added that several museums plan to exhibit their Layton drawings in the fall of 2017, the fortieth anniversary of the artist's first and only art class.

Elizabeth Layton's work has received numerous accolades. Kay Larson wrote in New York Magazine, "Considering her background, I am tempted to call Layton a genius." Hank Burchard, critic at the Washington Post dubbed her "Grandma Moses on Tabasco sauce." Jane Addams, Washington Times, called Layton the "Van Gogh of contour drawing." Art historian Lucy Lippard wrote, "she has unselfconsciously mastered the fusion of personal and political that so many progressive artists strive for. By using her own image to stand for all of denigrated, invisible, abused humanity, she has raised the universal from the particular."

Layton began drawing at the age of 68 and did nearly a thousand drawings in her 15-year career. She used the blind contour method, looking only into a mirror while drawing what she saw and felt. After only a few months, she realized that drawing had cured her 30-year manic depression, which had been treated with thirteen shock treatments. Her self-portraits deal with many contemporary issues- women's rights, racial prejudice, the environment, AIDS, marriage equality and ageing. Because learning to draw "saved" her life, she chose not to sell any of her works but gave many to charities including civil liberties projects, public television, arts organizations and women's shelters.

In addition to the museums listed above, her drawings were previously donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO; the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, NE; the Phoenix Art Museum in AZ; the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe; the Legion of Honor (Achenbach Foundation) in San Francisco, CA; the Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; the Landon Center on Aging at the University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City; Kansas Museum of History, Topeka; the Grassroots Art Center in Lucas, Kansas and the Wellsville Public Library, Kansas.