Olive Rush was born in Fairmount, Indiana, to a Quaker family with six children and raised on a farm at Rush Hill near Fairmount. She went to Washington D.C., where she studied at the Corcoran School of Art. She was the youngest person in her class, and after the first year received the prize in 1892 for the student who had shown the most progress.
After spending several years in Indianapolis, Olive Rush, age 41, settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the remainder of her life. With her father and brother, she had first gone to New Mexico and Arizona in 1914, visiting Indian communities. She later said that the experience "opened up a whole new world for me" (28) and led her to focus much more on her own painting. On Canyon Road, she bought and restored one of the oldest homes in the town, which had a population of about 7,000 people. Her place was on Canyon Road near the home and studio of printmaker Gustave Baumann and his wife.
In 1929, for the dining room of the La Fonda Hotel, owned by the Santa Fe Railroad, she did fresco decoration that had New Mexico figure scenes, native plants and animals. Because of her success with this project, she was hired by the head of the Santa Fe Indian School to oversee mural painting by the students for the school dining room. The project took six weeks and resulted from free-hand drawing by the students on the walls
Rush also did mural work for the Public Works Art Project (WPA), resulting in a mural for the entryway of the Santa Fe Public Library and in the biology Building of New Mexico State University at Las Cruces. She decorated post offices, and in 1939 spent time in Florence, Colorado to work directly on her mural Antelopes.
The career of Olive Rush was expansive, not only in subject matter, but geographically and stylistically from traditional to abstract to Oriental motifs. Her artistic output was shaped by the Quaker tenets she learned as a child: faith through good works, reverence for life, simple living and expression of inward grace.
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