It was founded in 1932 by Aimee Schweig, Bernard E. Peters, and Jessie Beard Rickly.
The colony was modeled on its most recent predecessor, the Provincetown Art Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as The Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art on Long Island, New York, the New Hope School in Pennsylvania, and the Taos art colony in New Mexico.
Genevieve contained rural vistas and genre scenes yet was close to the metropolitan Saint Louis area.
[3] The colony attracted many Midwestern artists with the styles of painting including American regionalism, Social realism, plein air and the new Abstract art.
[7] In 2011 the Museum of Art and Archaeology in Columbia, Missouri held a retrospective exhibition entitled A Midwestern View: The Artists of the Ste.