Todros Geller

[5] He designed stained glass windows for synagogues in Omaha, Fort Worth, Dayton, Stamford, and Chicago Heights.

[13] In 1926, Geller formed what would become a lengthy working relationship with Chicago publisher and cultural activist L. M. Shteyn (a pseudonym for Yitshak Leyb Fradkin, anglicized as L.M.

[6] In 1923, the Chicago Hebrew Institute's Observer (a forerunner of today's Jewish Community Center's[14]), included Geller as one of the "many well known artists" to have their works listed in an art exhibit catalogue.

[15] Geller was one of the founding members of "Around the Palette" in Chicago in 1926, a club where artists shared their personal views of art and its role in society.

[9] According to Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, inexpensive reproductions of Geller's art were popular with Chicago's Jewish Left in the 1930s, particularly a picture of a traditionally dressed Jewish man standing below the tracks of one of Chicago's elevated trains.

[8] The calendar project was intended to raise funds for the society activities and expose Chicago artists to a wider audience.

[25][26] Geller's contribution to the portfolio was a woodcut based on Raisins and Almonds, the Yiddish lullaby written by Abraham Goldfaden in 1880 for his operetta Shulamis.

[8] In 1937, Shteyn published a volume of about sixty woodcuts by Geller called From Land to Land, produced as part of the Federal Art Project (FAP), the visual arts arm of the Great Depression-era New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal One program in the United States.

[2] As an important staple of Jewish life in Eastern Europe that were believed to have mystical qualities, goats were a dominant symbol in Geller's artistic vocabulary.

[28] It was the first tribally owned museum in the United States,[29] and was built with support from a WPA-sponsored program for the preservation of Native American culture.

[9] The archive includes photographs, sketchbooks, original artwork, commissions for stained glass windows, various manuscript material including typescripts of articles, papers relating to the American Artists' Congress, 1937–1938, and correspondence with art organizations and artists such as A. Raymond Katz, Beatrice Levy, Archibald Motley, Increase Robinson, and Carl Zigrosser.

[9] The Spertus Institute also holds a number of Geller's oil paintings including Landscape with Figure (1924),[39] Portrait of a Man (1929),[40] Crossroads (ca.

[44] In March 2011, Susan Weininger, Professor Emerita of Art History at Roosevelt University gave a lecture titled "The Dean of Chicago Jewish Artists: Todros Geller & the Chicago Context" at North Shore Synagogue Beth El, Highland Park, Illinois, in conjunction with an exhibit of Geller's woodcut prints.

L. M. Shteyn Farlag logo (1937)
Illustration for Rose G Lurie's children's book, The Great March: Post Biblical Jewish Stories (1931) from the " Whither--now? " story about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain
From Land to Land (1937) endpapers
Oklahoma Indian dancer (1936)
Hassidic (1927)
Chicago's Maxwell Street used as an illustration in Louis Wirth 's The Ghetto