Elizabeth McFadden (1912-1986) was an American artist known best for her delicate paper and fabric collages. Born in Belmar, New Jersey, McFadden was the daughter of Anne Ryan, an Abstract Expressionist artist celebrated for her work in the same medium. McFadden ultimately published a memoir, Anne Ryan: A Personal Remembrance, and donated much of her mother’s work to prestigious museum collections around the country, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York.

In 1934, around the time McFadden graduated from The College of St. Elizabeth in Covent, New Jersey, she began dating Tony Smith, who would later become a celebrated sculptor, painter, and architect. Smith was among a young coterie of friends who encouraged McFadden’s mother, Anne Ryan, to abandon the bakery she was running in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and move to Greenwich Village. In 1956, 1958, and 1960, McFadden had solo exhibitions at New York’s esteemed Betty Parsons Gallery, which at the time represented art world luminaries like Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt. Writing about McFadden’s 1956 gallery exhibition for The New York Times, Dore Ashton described her collages as “gay explorations that contrast bright fabrics, textured papers, and bits of colorful oddments.” Hanging alongside several works by her mother, McFadden was later shown in the landmark 1961 exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, curated by William Seitz for The Museum of Modern Art. Aside from her artistic career, McFadden maintained a day job as a medical and science reporter for the Newark Evening News for several decades.

More recently in 2015, McFadden’s work was included in The Precarious, an exhibition organized by curated David Breslin for The Menil Collection in Houston, TX, where her work hung alongside that of Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Anne Ryan, among others. Both The Museum of Modern Art and The Menil Collection have examples of McFadden’s work in their permanent collection.