Gene Kloss (1903 – 1996) was a California-born printmaker and painter whose more than six hundred copper-plate etchings of Pueblo ceremony and Southwestern landscape made her one of the most accomplished and dedicated artistic chroniclers of the American Southwest.Gene Kloss, whose full name was Alice Geneva Kloss (born Alice Geneva Glasier), was born in Oakland, California, in 1903 and grew up in the Bay Area. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, where a course in etching taught by Perham Nahl produced what she later described as an immediate revelation: amazed by the first print she pulled from the press, Nahl predicted she would become an etcher. She went on to study at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. In 1925 she married Phillips Kloss, a poet, and the couple made a honeymoon journey to New Mexico. It was a decisive moment. Looking back on her first experience of a Southwestern sunset, Kloss wrote that she was a New Mexican from then on.Kloss's Art StyleKloss was largely self-taught as a printmaker, developing her mastery of the copper-plate etching process through sustained practice over decades, printing each plate herself. Her subjects were the Pueblo communities of northern New Mexico and the extraordinary landscape that surrounded them, rendered with a fidelity and sensitivity that came from a lifetime of close observation. Her etchings convey both the ceremonial richness of Pueblo life and the vast, luminous quality of the Southwestern terrain, capturing firelight, open sky, and the textures of adobe and earth with a precision that only the etching needle can achieve.Gene Kloss and the SouthwestThe Klosses divided their time between Berkeley and Taos for many years, returning every summer until they settled permanently in Taos, where Phillips crafted poems while Gene worked at the press. She wrote that an artist must keep in close contact with nature and with humanity's fundamental reliance on nature in order to produce a significant body of work, a conviction that shaped every plate she made. Her commitment to the region, its people, and its light was total and lifelong.LegacyKloss's mastery of printmaking earned her election as an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1950 and full Academician in 1972, one of the highest recognitions available to an American artist working in that tradition. Over a career spanning more than six decades, she produced more than six hundred etchings, a body of work that stands as one of the most sustained and accomplished achievements in the history of American printmaking.