“Bring Art down from that high, ethereal, insurmountable pedestal on which the majority of people place it, and mix it thoroughly into everyday life,” wrote one of Ruby Short McKim’s high school pupils in Independence, Missouri, in the 1915 yearbook. McKim taught her students the importance of making art accessible to all people, something she learned from her influential New York City art instructor, Frank Alvah Parsons.

In 1916, McKim designed her simple, Mother Goose illustrations for a child’s quilt. Newspapers syndicated this and many other of her designs nationwide during the 1920s and 1930s, making her the artist whose work reached more quiltmakers than any other of the time.