Shelby Shackelford (1899–1987) was an American artist who worked mainly within the art communities of Baltimore, Maryland, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

[1] Early in her career, during a period when many in Baltimore were hostile to what locals called "advanced" trends in art, her paintings were stigmatized as "meaningless stuff".

[2] After helping to counteract these local prejudices, she embarked on a long period of experimentation in media and technique, maintaining, as she wrote in 1957, that painting was, "an adventure, a process of discovery for which there should be no end".

[8] Shackelford passed most of her childhood in Fredericksburg and at Stuart Hall, a private boarding school for girls in Staunton, Virginia.

[9] In 1912, she attended a boarding school in Switzerland, where she learned French and, during holidays, traveled with her mother to see galleries in Italy and Paris.

There, working under Ross Moffett and Marguerite Zorach, she recaptured her love of painting and recommitted herself to a career as a professional artist.

[18] After her return to the United States, she showed four drawings in a group exhibition of student works staged by the Provincetown Art Association.

Like any artist, I am concerned with the balance of form and color, and I am continually surprised by the beauty of line, and the possibilities of textures.

Over the wide range of subjects selected by Miss Shackelford a lively intelligence plays constantly: in her separate works there is a vision of a part of the world, unified, clear, intense.

And art, if it is to be something more than an escape and if it is to provide a purpose other than that of being pursued by collectors and chortled over by cliques, needs intelligence and vision — needs them if as in the high standing words of Paul Gaultier it really is 'a harmonious and integral expansion of all our nature in the faculty of feeling.

[20] The club's annual all-American exhibition is said to have then been "the high point of Baltimore's brief art season" and her paintings were among only 70 works selected from among submissions by 130 artists.

[24] Shackelford showed paintings at an exhibition held by the Society of Independent Artists at New York's Waldorf Astoria in February 1925, including a self-portrait that a Baltimore critic believed to be daringly modern.

One of these drawings may have been a portrait of her close friend, Janice Biala[28][note 2] In 1928, She exhibited a painting called "Accordion Player", showing a figure said to be "at once vigorous and lax in his posture".

[29] Between 1930 and 1936, her paintings and drawings appeared in the annual modern shows and in 1932 and 1933 she was a member of the jury that selected works for exhibition.

Each show included prints by both modern and traditional printmakers and the Institute took steps to ensure that the selection process was fair to both groups.

[49] Beginning in 1946 and continuing into the mid-1960s, she participated in group exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art and regional non-profit organizations.

[60][61] During this period, she also participated in an innovative group exhibition at Baltimore Junior College, contributed paintings to art rental program she had helped to establish at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and showed drawings, prints, and paintings in a variety of group exhibitions at academic and nonprofit galleries.

Regarding an exhibition in which she participated with five other artists that was held at the Fells Point Gallery in Baltimore, a critic for the Baltimore Sun wrote, "Shelby Shackelford, in delicate drawings, invests a variety of mineral specimens with mystery and, in the painting, "Part of This Sphere" endows inanimate nature with a feeling of passionate life.

"[4] This critic noted skill in handling a "definite rhythm of composition", her ability to achieve a "harmony of colors", and her "precision of method" and called attention to the expressiveness in her works.

Of one painting showing figures in a landscape the critic wrote, "Miss Shackelford has taken the ordinary elements of sky, land, men and women and made them something more, given them spirit and a concentrated life different from that of any one of them and more profound because it arises from the relating and harmonizing of their individualities."

He noted that at this point in her career, she was "primarily a nature painter" and said that her use of casein had achieved a "spectral purity" in a landscape called "Green Composition".

[76] In the latter year, she submitted a letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun explaining the operation of the Artists Advisory Committee.

[53] In 1933, Shackelford illustrated a book by her husband: Time, Space, and Atoms by Richard T. Cox (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins company).

It was published as part of a series called "Century of Progress" that aimed to present the "essential features of those fundamental sciences which are the foundation stones of modern industry".

(1936, New York, C. Scribner's sons), it explains how caterpillars become moths or butterflies, how to tell frogs from toads, and how ants go about their busy lives.

In a lengthy review, a critic for the New York Times explained that the book balances scientific explanations with word portraits of "the lush vegetation, the brilliant colors of the tropics, the people and their ways".

So when the eel is pursued to a more remote habitat on the big island of Marajo she makes a delightfully pictorial story of the boat trip, the visit to the cattle ranch, the arresting individuality of the masterful lady who is the ranch owner, and the details she notices in the lives of the island folk".

[83] Her mother, Anna Williams Fassmann Shackelford (1864-1940), was connected to wealthy and socially prominent families in New Orleans and Nashville.

[8] In a "personal statement" written in 1957, she described her efforts to balance the competing claims of work and family: "As our children, a boy and a girl, took more of my time, I painted when they slept or made drawings of them whenever I could.

"[1] Shackelford and Cox met in Baltimore, married in her hometown in Virginia, and spent the early years of their marriage in Manhattan where he had a teaching position at New York University.