Tom Lea was born on July 11, 1907, in EI Paso, Texas, across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Lea’s high school teacher encouraged him to attend art school, and at age seventeen he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Lea studied there from 1924 to 1926 and was strongly influenced by one of his esteemed professors, John W. Norton. Lea spent the next six years working for Norton on mural projects in the Chicago area. Tom Lea was certainly the most successful artist to come out of El Paso in terms of his success and notoriety. He was in a league of his own. Hal Marcus was especially intrigued by his draftsmanship used in his drawings. He was also very talented in his writing career. He was one of the few people successful in both art and writing. You can still see original Tom Lea work in many public places in El Paso like the El Paso Public Library downtown, the Federal Court House and the El Paso Museum of Art. He loved the color and shapes of our region – the desert. Though he saw much of the world, he loved to live and work here in El Paso.
