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• 1 2017-11-08T07:45:57-08:00 The Life of Betty Raphael 9 plain 2017-12-11T10:48:11-08:00 Betty Raphael (Elizabeth Rockwell Raphael) was born in 1920 in a Pennsylvania town called, Oakmont. Little did she know, that she would become one of the most influential women in the art world in the state of Pennsylvania. Raphael is most known for bringing the idea of modern art to the city of Pittsburgh. Prior to her involvement with, The Store for Arts, Crafts, and People-Made Things, now called Contemporary Craft located in the Strip District, she created her own gallery for the people of Pittsburgh in 1941.
  
  This gallery was named, Outlines and was open until 1947. Unfortunately, the gallery did not have much financial success but this was essentially when modern art was introduced to the city of Pittsburgh. Some of the paintings she exhibited in the gallery's first show included, artworks by Matisse, Picasso, and Seurat. Betty Raphael was exhibited some of the most well-known avant-garde artists. The organization was fortunate enough to discover all of this information from Raphael's personal scrapbooks that were found in the Carnegie Library in Oakland, PA. But, her involvement within the art world did not end there.
  
  In 1971, she acquired a craft store in Verona, PA. Here, she demonstrated the importance and value of crafting. She wanted crafts to be considered a form of art equal in importance to painting or drawing. So in order to show even more people these kinds of crafts, she hosted and curated, "Arts in Modern Handcrafts" in 1979 at the Carnegie Museum of Art.