Attributing much of her success to her work ethic and drive, Margo Allman first realized that she wanted to be an artist while studying at Smith College in 1951. Going on to complete coursework at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, the Moore College of Art & Design and the University of Delaware, she cites her most important influences as Leonard Nelson, a professor at Moore College of Art & Design, and her parents, Werner H. Hutz and Avis Newcomb. Beyond her formal studies, she considers the most important lesson she has learned over the years to be to find your way of doing things and to stick to it. Furthermore, Ms. Allman finds continued motivation through the natural world and life itself.
An accomplished sculptor and painter, Ms. Allman’s work has appeared in countless solo and group exhibitions since 1954 and she has had a long-standing relationship with the Delaware Art Museum. Currently, she is working with the Delaware Art Museum on a video about her art, which comes on the tails of her show, “Layered Abstraction,” part of the Distinguished Artist Series that ran from March 2020 to January 2021. Previous shows with the museum include “Layering Constructs” and “Dream Streets” in 2015 and various group shows between 1958 and 2010. Furthermore, Ms. Allman has several pieces that feature in the Delaware Art Museum’s permanent collection as well.
Particularly proud of the month-long, independent art show she had at the Church Street Gallery in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 2018, Ms. Allman’s art has also appeared in group shows at West Chester University, the Meridian Bank in Pennsylvania, the Biggs Museum of American Art in Delaware and the Widener University Art Gallery, among her more recent exhibitions. In addition to her work appearing in a variety of galleries and museums on the East Coast of the United States, she has also been featured in international exhibitions, including the show “Parallel Visions” at the Vonderau Museum in Germany in 2007. In addition to the Delaware Art Museum, Ms. Allman’s work appears in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tidewater Publishers in Maryland, Hercules, Inc. in Wilmington, Delaware, and Connolly Bove Lodge & Hutz LLP.
In addition to her primary responsibilities, Ms. Allman has contributed her skills to a number of other professional endeavors. In 1995, she spent time as the artist-in-residence for Canakkale Seramik with the Kale Group, a ceramics company in Turkey, and previously had served on the board of directors for the Robert Small Dance Company in New York City from 1979 to 1980. She also holds membership with both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Woodmere Art Museum and is a charter member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Delaware Art Museum, The Delaware Contemporary and the Moore College of Art & Design Alumnae Association.
For her excellence, Ms. Allman has received a number of honors and accolades over the course of her career, including being featured in a 2008 retrospective at West Chester University. In 1998, she was presented with a Distinguished Alumnae Award from the Moore College of Art & Design, and, earlier in her career, she was recognized with the Landscape Prize from the Wilmington Trust Bank in 1969 and the Mildred Boericke Prize from the Print Club of Philadelphia in 1958. Above everything, Ms. Allman considers the most rewarding aspect of her career to be the fact that she is never truly finished and that there is always something more, some next step she can take to improve her pieces.
Looking toward the future, Ms. Allman hopes to leave a legacy as someone who really knew how to look at and pay attention to the world around her, which, in turn, makes her art feel alive and energetic. She would advise young and aspiring professions to follow their passions, but to also not be discouraged if they need to pick up a secondary career to help support their art. Spending many happy years married to her late husband, William B. Allman, Ms. Allman is the proud mother of two children, Avis Louis Allman and David Drue Allman, and the doting grandmother to two grandchildren, Kevin and Valarie.